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What AC Dual Band Router?
- Thread starter sailfishx
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I never had an issue where QoS was necessary. In fact, it is possible that Apple routers perform QoS themselves but it isn't a documented features. In reality, I could have the best Cisco network deployed with some of the best QoS features. However, AirPort does what I need and I can't ask anything more of it. I serve over 75 clients across a roaming network and it just works. Eight Expresses (2012 2nd gen.) and one Extreme (5th gen.) acting as a controller and it runs beautifully. On the main network I never get lower than 40 Mbps down on a congested AP or 50 down on less crowded one. Our connection for this network is 57 down, 11 up. Also for the guest network for us is a BYOD network which does 17 down and 11 up for all clients. Never had an issue at all aside from one bad antenna in the Extreme and an Express which reset its settings during a thunderstorm. I love AirPort!
Probably untrue. I would be very (pleasantly) surprised you could hook a HFS+ or ext4-formatted drive and have it recognized.
What kind of connection is that? And what cap is there on it?
It is a Comcast Business Class account which proposes 60 Mbps down and 13 up. That is measured through speedtest.net! The modem is an SMC gateway running as a router so unfortunately it is double NAT. Can't use bridge mode on a network like this.
What does that have to do with it? Buy any drive you want and format it in Disk Util to whatever format the router requires.
Then correct your statement: "Any properly-formatted hard drive will work".
It implies that one cannot be hooking a drive that was previously used as a directly-attached storage to the Mac. It has to go through a data transfer first, format, then transfer it back.
I would love to see Ext4 support for networked drives via consumer grade rotuers. However, if they aren't really supporting Mac OS Extended drives, then why would they support a smaller percentage of users. Essentially, most routers say Fat32 or NTFS and that's all I will take.
Indeed, and that's an issue, considering you have to choose either 4-GB max file size on FAT32, or read-only capability if you were to connect the drive to the Mac in case you'd like to debug a router misbehavior.
Yeah... my statement "any drive will work" is just fine.
Thanks for the pedantic post though.
Ugh, sorry your helpful post got dragged through the mud, Weaselboy. I understood what you meant.
I do have one more question for you. If you have an external drive connected to your router, can you unplug it and plug it directly into your mac? Will it be recognized as the same hard drive?
I'm thinking about getting one of these AC routers and using 2 tb externals that I already own to use as time machine backups. But there may be the occasional situation where I would prefer to plug them directly into my computer. Will it work?
Or better question yet, since they are already being used as Time Machine backup drives, could I plug them into the router and Time Machine will still function without any additional steps? Or do I need to set up a new path to the router-connected drive?
tl;dr Can I plug my 2 usb enclosures into this router and time machine will continue working?
http://www.amazon.com/RT-AC68U-Wireless-AC1900-Dual-Band-Gigabit-Router/dp/B00FB45SI4/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1393607737&sr=8-2&keywords=r7000
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Yes, it will be recognized and you can copy files back and forth.
For a router to work with Time Machine it needs to support the Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) and it looks like the Asus RT-AC68U you linked does support it. Asus recommends formatting the drives in the native Mac OS Extended (HFS+) format if you want to use them with Time Machine. Here is how to turn on AFP Time Machine support in the router. So yes... just format your existing drives and attach them to the Asus then point TM to those disks for backup. If you are on Mountain Lion or Mavericks you can even set up two Time Machine backups (one to each drive) and they will alternate.
Nope... that won't work for Time Machine. A locally attached (like USB) drive uses a flat file format to store the Time Machine (TM) data. A networked TM backup stores the data inside a sparse bundle image, so the two are not interchangeable. So once you start with a locally attached TM backup, you are committed to continuing that unless you want to start over. Same goes with the networked backup. (If you are in a jam there is a way to manually get inside the networked sparse bundle file and use that data for a USB restore... but you don't want to be going back and forth doing this.)
But if you just want to store some files on those disks in a folder outside of TM, yes you can do that and it will work either over the network or locally.
Nope... see above explanation.
P.S. That router looks like it has some nice features.
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Weaselboy,
Despite your handle indicating otherwise (twice), you are THE MAN.
Thank you for all of your detailed advice. Mentally I was expecting a simple "yes" or "no." But this was incredibly more helpful. Thank you, thank you.
Your laptop will not recognize the drive - at least not directly. The drive is for the use of the router itself. The drive might be used as storage for a media server, network storage server, print server, etc. etc. etc.
If your router has a network storage server, then you could activate that server, and you could connect to it just like you would a network share on a different PC. You could use all or part of the drive as storage for the network share.
If the router behaves correctly, I would assume yes. However, you'll loose write ability if it's an NTFS, but keep the same limitations for a FAT32 drive. The other question would be if the file permissions would follow the machine, or if you'd need to change them before using the files on it.
As long as chosen router supports HFS+ and AFP.
Alas, I found that ASUS-WRT has nothing to do with OpenWrt. I guess "wrt" is just a generic term meaning Wireless RouTer.
The firmware is open-source, though, and there's a much-enhanced version Asus-Wrt-Merlin open-sourced on GitHub.
It's not the same as running OpenWrt, which is a Linux distribution, and I presume Asus-Wrt is not. I don't think you can just install packages like with OpenWrt.
Still, it looks like my best choice, because there is almost zero support for any 802.11ac routers for OpenWrt.
The firmware is open-source, though, and there's a much-enhanced version Asus-Wrt-Merlin open-sourced on GitHub.
It's not the same as running OpenWrt, which is a Linux distribution, and I presume Asus-Wrt is not. I don't think you can just install packages like with OpenWrt.
Still, it looks like my best choice, because there is almost zero support for any 802.11ac routers for OpenWrt.
I don't think Tomato supports any of the new routers. It was written in the wireless-g era.
I can't say enough good things about the Asus RT-AC68R I picked up a few months ago. It was easy to set up and I love all the control I have over it and the devices connected to it. I have daily 2 pc's, 1 rMBP, 1 PB G4, 1 PowerMac G5, 1 iPhone 5s, 1 iPhone 5, 1 iPhone 4, 2 iPod touch's, 1 iPad mini, 1 Samsung Galaxy S3, 2 X-Box 360's, and 2 Playstation 3's all hooked up. This is the stuff that gets used daily in my house and have not had an issue since I purchased it. I had just the standard Comcast router before and had varying degrees of signal sometimes devices wouldn't connect to the wifi and all sorts of problems but we just dealt with it. When i bought my new rMBP I wanted an AC capable router and this was one of the highest rated and we went with it. We have the largest house in the family so Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners and birthday parties are always at my house. Besides the almost 20 devices we have another 20 or so get connected from their PSP's, to laptops, iPad's and cell phones. I have never had an issue of loosing connection or anything. With the Comcast router I would get about 12-18 Mbps on my rMBP on the other side of the house, now it isn't uncommon to see over 60 Mbps and the only thing I changed was the router. I have to separate names for each band and can have an additional 6 guest networks if I wanted. It has been well worth the money in my opinion.
Victor
Victor
I did like the Tomato firmware on the old blue Linksys routers, but now they are all unsupported. I am all for getting the most out of your hardware that you paid good money for, but sometimes I like to sit back and let the defaults do the work in simplicity (AirPort). That being said, ASUS routers really are blending it all together pretty well.
One thing I did notice is that Apple devices tend to negotiate with AirPorts better. e.g. My Netgear gave the same S/N ratio and transfer rate, but only showed 4 bars on my Mac. The AirPort gave 5. I don't know why that is but it certainly looks good. The main reason I started with AirPorts was the 40 MHz spectrum.
The so-called channel bonding?
As I said there's a reason I keep this WRT54GL handy. I don't trust the incumbent into respecting net neutrality and not throttling connections, and so far only Tomato had a working MLPPP mod.
http://wlanpros2.project.ihelphosting.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Wi-Fi Stress Test Report.pdf
Have a look right here. It shows some stats on the AirPort Extreme. It is a simple, yet reliable and powerful! It lacks some of the speed of the newest models from manufacturers like ASUS.
Wireless is not about giving every client the most Mbps; it is about enforcing a fair and equal yet reliable and consistent experience for all clients across the network.
Interesting document. Although I don't have enough peripherals needing permanent wired or wireless access, I am still thinking about upgrading mainly because the WRT54GL's CPU has trouble keeping up (and keep ping down) with my 15Mbps connection (That didn't existed when it was sold).
I am not sure what CPU is in the WRT54 series but I am sure it isn't anything powerful! Even the Expresses from the same timeframe would beat it out in benchmarks. However, I think the Express is a great AP, I find the Extreme to be the way to go in terms of routers overall.
It is a Broadcom running at 200MHz I think. Back then the Airport was horribly expensive, and I would have no way of managing it since there was no Apple-branded device in the house. Really the WRT54GL provided the best bang for the buck as a requirement for proper high-speed connection was MLPPP, which Airport doesn't support.