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Does any 3rd party router firmware support USB file sharing?

K

KLC

Senior member
I bought an ASUS WL-500gp V2 because the cheaper ASUS router suddenly evaporated, nobody had it in stock. But the 500 appealed to me because of ASUS's marketing about USB file sharing, plugging an external drive into the router's USB port and making it available to all network users. Plus, Newegg had a $30 rebate making the total price about $50 so I bought it.

After having no success setting up the file sharing I finally received a reply from ASUS, file sharing only works with FAT32 or EXT3 files systems, not NTFS. I do a lot of video so all of my drives are NTFS.

Do any of the third party firmwares support USB file sharing on this router?

I should add that the router itself is great, I had zero home networking experience and I was able to get a wired PC, wireless PC and network printer set up and working in about half an hour. I like everything about the router but I really wanted to use the file sharing.
 
The firmware are Linux based and thus does not support NTFS.

Even the standalone NAS boxes do not support NTFS.

This is one of the reason that most of the time I recommend to use a regular computer as a NAS.

Old computer, P-III class, with big drive and inexpensive OS like Windows 2000 Pro is a good solution.

The best right now is to run Windows Home Server (the OS goes for $99.99) and runs well on a P-III 1GHz computer, or Intel ATOM, if one wants to conserve energy.

In addition running a computer with Giga card provide better network bandwidth than the NAS' do.
 
Yes I would recommend a standalone PC setup as a file server. NAS boxes are good for BASIC file sharing, that's it. For anything specific like speed, NTFS, etc, you need a standalone box. I ended up buying a server off of Dell for a couple hundred $$, I started off with a 1ghz though, I just started using it for more and more things. It's now my file server, FTP server, backup server (Acronis TI) & media server. Hard drives are also cheap, I have 2 1tb drives in mine, cost $150 apiece.
 
I don't know how hackable that box is but if there's custom firmware out there you might be able to find with one with NTFS-3g installed so that you could read and write to NTFS volumes.
 
Originally posted by: JackMDS
The firmware are Linux based and thus does not support NTFS.

Even the standalone NAS boxes do not support NTFS.

This is one of the reason that most of the time I recommend to use a regular computer as a NAS.

Old computer, P-III class, with big drive and inexpensive OS like Windows 2000 Pro is a good solution.

The best right now is to run Windows Home Server (the OS goes for $99.99) and runs well on a P-III 1GHz computer, or Intel ATOM, if one wants to conserve energy.

In addition running a computer with Giga card provide better network bandwidth than the NAS' do.
Click to expand...


Additionally, most USB drives are not intended to be plugged in 24/7.
 
Thanks everyone for so much good information, lots to consider and learn.

Since we don't really need to share the video files I'm thinking of getting a FAT32 external USB drive and putting on the docs, music and pictures, leaving off the video. That seems to be the easiest solution right now.
 
Doan, I'm very new to any networking although I've used PCs for more than 20 years, built several, like to read and learn more about them, etc. I assume an external drive formatted in EX could only be used attached to the router since it would be incompatible with a windows PC, is that correct? I thought of just using FAT32 so that I could attach it to any PC in the network if I needed to.

To follow up on the replies above recommending using a computer for file sharing, would this HP mediaserver also serve the same function? I think I saw this on costco online a while ago and wondered what it was. Now I think I understand what it's used for but it is no longer there.

Thanks again for the help and education.
 
Originally posted by: Nothinman
There are ext3 drivers for Windows, never used them myself though.
Click to expand...

They are very unstable from my experience. I would treat them the same way as the older NTFS drivers for Linux. While I never experience any data corruption using it, I would often get BSOD's from the driver.
 
There's also a purely userland explorer-type program that will let you extract files from the drive, it's not a driver so it's not seamless but it also can't BSOD the machine.
 
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