Advice on storage formatting with RT-N66U

[ursus]

Hello!

I've read through forum and tested couple of possibilities, but I need advice from more experienced users on how to approach my case.

I have RT-N66U + 1TB USB disk attached to it. I need advice how to format it to have:

• DLNA with movies streaming to TV and other devices
• storage with access from Windows PCs
• Entware
• Transmission to setup bit torrent
• Place to backup my PC's data
• AiCloud for photos
• network share for Sonos music

Obviously I would stay on my previous NTFS, but as said on forums it's breaking and not compatible.
So, now the real questions come:

• How much I should put on ext3 partitions and how much leave on NTFS?
• Would it be enough to get couple GB for DLNA config files + Entware and rest leave running from NTFS?
• Will Transmission work from NTFS?
• Or maybe I should go fully into ext3?
• If my router dies would my ext3 partitions will be usable when I plug my drive into my Windows PC? I assume it will be a little bit tricky.

I'm sure that there are plenty of users with similar setup and someone already came up with clever idea how to optimally organize it. I don't want to reinvent the well. Thanks in advance for your help

 

[agbommarito]

Hello!

I've read through forum and tested couple of possibilities, but I need advice from more experienced users on how to approach my case.

I have RT-N66U + 1TB USB disk attached to it. I need advice how to format it to have:

• DLNA with movies streaming to TV and other devices
• storage with access from Windows PCs
• Entware
• Transmission to setup bit torrent
• Place to backup my PC's data
• AiCloud for photos

Obviously I would stay on my previous NTFS, but as said on forums it's breaking and not compatible.
So, now the real questions come:

• How much I should put on ext3 partitions and how much leave on NTFS?
• Would it be enough to get couple GB for DLNA config files + Entware and rest leave running from NTFS?
• Will Transmission work from NTFS?
• Or maybe I should go fully into ext3?
• If my router dies would my ext3 partitions will be usable when I plug my drive into my Windows PC? I assume it will be a little bit tricky.

I'm sure that there are plenty of users with similar setup and someone already came up with clever idea how to optimally organize it. I don't want to reinvent the well. Thanks in advance for your help

I have the same device as you (RT-N66U) with a similar USB disk arrangement. After playing with NTFS for some time, I decided to completely reformat the disk as ext3. I used Ubuntu running in a VMware virtual machine on a Windows PC to do so. The main reasons for reformatting were reliability and stability. The NTFS formatted disk would do random odd things, like refuse connections and develop lost clusters. Since reformatting nearly a year ago, I've had none of those issues.

I haven't had a need to disconnect the drive from the router, but if I did, I could connect it to the Ubuntu virtual machine again. Or there is a Windows installable freeware driver available from Paragon Software that will allow you to mount Linux formatted disks as a Windows drive.

I use the drive for DLNA, for streaming music files to a SONOS and for PC backup, and have had no issues doing any of this.

I had particularly aggravating problems doing PC backup when the drive was formatted with NTFS. A backup would run for many hours and then the drive would timeout and the backup would be aborted. I was only able to do backups by disconnecting the drive from the router and plugging it directly into the PC. Now I can leave the drive on the router and do backups over the network.

 

[RMerlin]

BTW, Paragon (same company that makes the NTFS driver used by Asuswrt) now has an EXT3 driver for Windows, free for home use. It lets you mount and access ext2/ext3 drive as native drives under Windows.

Seemed to work fairly well when I tried it out, aside from the lack of ext security management.

 

[ursus]

I have the same device as you (RT-N66U) with a similar USB disk arrangement. After playing with NTFS for some time, I decided to completely reformat the disk as ext3. I used Ubuntu running in a VMware virtual machine on a Windows PC to do so. The main reasons for reformatting were reliability and stability. The NTFS formatted disk would do random odd things, like refuse connections and develop lost clusters. Since reformatting nearly a year ago, I've had none of those issues.

I haven't had a need to disconnect the drive from the router, but if I did, I could connect it to the Ubuntu virtual machine again. Or there is a Windows installable freeware driver available from Paragon Software that will allow you to mount Linux formatted disks as a Windows drive.

I use the drive for DLNA, for streaming music files to a SONOS and for PC backup, and have had no issues doing any of this.

I had particularly aggravating problems doing PC backup when the drive was formatted with NTFS. A backup would run for many hours and then the drive would timeout and the backup would be aborted. I was only able to do backups by disconnecting the drive from the router and plugging it directly into the PC. Now I can leave the drive on the router and do backups over the network.

Thanks a lot for advice I followed your guidance and now I'm in the process to move fully to ext3 filesystem. I used Linux VM under VMWare player to format the disk and transfer the data from NTFS to ext3.

I tried to use paragon driver, but it seems buggy - whenever I plugged in disk with ext3 partition, driver refused to see any of my disks

Anyway I have my Sonos playing music from my ext3 partition and I'm in the process of setting up DLNA.

Thanks again!

 

[ursus]

BTW, Paragon (same company that makes the NTFS driver used by Asuswrt) now has an EXT3 driver for Windows, free for home use. It lets you mount and access ext2/ext3 drive as native drives under Windows.

Seemed to work fairly well when I tried it out, aside from the lack of ext security management.

It didn't worked for me. When I plugged in disk with ext3 partition driver either refused to see this disk or refused to see any disks.

I had hard time to find meaningful documentation for this driver and even Paragon among their different websites have problem with deciding whether they have such product or not.

After initial bad experience I ditched this driver and used Linux VM as driver didn't seem to be reliable.

Anyway thanks for advice.

 

[RMerlin]

It didn't worked for me. When I plugged in disk with ext3 partition driver either refused to see this disk or refused to see any disks.

I had hard time to find meaningful documentation for this driver and even Paragon among their different websites have problem with deciding whether they have such product or not.

After initial bad experience I ditched this driver and used Linux VM as driver didn't seem to be reliable.

Anyway thanks for advice.

That doesn't surprise me. Aside from the fact that porting a filesystem to a completely different OS is far from trivial, their NTFS implementation for Linux can be similarly quirky at times.

 

[KAD]

reading that I thought I'd try the paragon extfs driver as well

poor to no documentation
they make you register to activate
AVG actually reported it as possible virus (driver, not does not get registered with system)

also while it installed and creates desktop shortcut, does not create start menu item
so if you delete shortcut, only way to access is by delving into programs folder

 

[DSwit]

Is there a particular reason you didn't just remove the existing partition and then use the rt-n66u to format the drive to ext3?

When I decided to setup entware I used windows disk manager to remove the existing partition on my seagate 550g usb2 drive and simply plugged it into the rt-n66u and used the /usr/sbin/mkfs.ext3 utility to format the drive. I haven't had any problems with transmission or vsftpd so far, are there some issues with the asus provided fsck and mkfs tools?

tia

 

[ursus]

Is there a particular reason you didn't just remove the existing partition and then use the rt-n66u to format the drive to ext3?

500 GB of data that I already had on this drive and my laptop and that needed to be on new partition.

For me it was more convenient (and faster) to do this through VM.

When I decided to setup entware I used windows disk manager to remove the existing partition on my seagate 550g usb2 drive and simply plugged it into the rt-n66u and used the /usr/sbin/mkfs.ext3 utility to format the drive. I haven't had any problems with transmission or vsftpd so far, are there some issues with the asus provided fsck and mkfs tools?
tia

This is what I'm going to do right now with rest of my disk.
I have it already plugged in to rt-n66u and now I'm going to remove my old ntfs partition and create new ext3 one.
Thanks for answer, it's good to hear that native linux tools on rt-n66u are working as expected.

 

[agbommarito]

Is there a particular reason you didn't just remove the existing partition and then use the rt-n66u to format the drive to ext3?

When I decided to setup entware I used windows disk manager to remove the existing partition on my seagate 550g usb2 drive and simply plugged it into the rt-n66u and used the /usr/sbin/mkfs.ext3 utility to format the drive. I haven't had any problems with transmission or vsftpd so far, are there some issues with the asus provided fsck and mkfs tools?

tia

In my case, I already had the VMware Ubuntu virtual machine set up for other purposes. And the DLNA data and music library I wanted on the USB disk existed on the PC. So it was more convenient for me to do the work on the PC. I see no reason why the same thing couldn't be done on the router by Telnet'ing in.