External USB drive for USB/NAS Port on Netgear Hub

[mitchelt]

I tried using an older Western Digital drive on the USB/NAS port on my:

NETGEAR N600 (WNDR3700) WIRELESS DUAL BAND GIGABIT ROUTER

but the drive goes into Sleep mode and you cannot connect to it.

Which External USB Drive do you recommend I use that does not go to sleep?

Thanks,

Mitch

 

[beginner99]

i have a WNDR3700 and I can say forget your idea. Drives connected to it are very, very slow. Like 5 mb/s max. But in general all drives should work if your router isn't broken.

 

[mitchelt]

i have a WNDR3700 and I can say forget your idea. Drives connected to it are very, very slow. Like 5 mb/s max. But in general all drives should work if your router isn't broken.

Thank you for the information about the speed, the drive will only be used to store photos...no streaming.

As for any drive working, sorry that is not true. A drive that goes to sleep after xx minutes will not work on the router.

 

[smitbret]

Google 'HDCaffeine'. It's a little program that sends a 1 byte write to the drive every minute or so to keep it from going in to sleep mode.

From my experience, most of them have some kind of sleep feature. You used to be able to turn the sleep mode off in the Seagates using SeaTools or something like that. Not sure if that's still the case. Avoid the Toshiba Canvio Desktops, though. They are very liberal in their application of sleep mode and there's no way to turn it off.

In the end, though, you'll probably be very dissatisfied with connecting a HDD to your router. It just doesn't work well. If you have some spare parts lying around, just build a cheap unRAID box and throw an internal HDD in it.