Asuswrt-Merlin 3.0.0.4.266.23b is out

[nubyOz]

Do we know authoritatively whether a given HDD will last longer spinning full time or part time?

Hi,

Certain "green" drives like WD have limited amount of start stop cycle (LLC is the acronym used I believe).
When they get close to max their SMART info will flag the drive as failing.
Had that happen in my NAS when NAS was hibernating after short time idle.
Short term fix disable spin down (set time out to 0), long term fixed I replaced with WD Balck edition.

The best drive for those operations are definitely the new WD Red edition, build for SOHO NAS, not sure about other brands.

Problem in USB enclosures you often dont know what drive is in it.
I discovered they contain often "Green" drives, not suitable for continuous operation.

My preference is for proper NAS with Gigabit.

Regards

 

[pncu]

Download Master will constantly access the disk, so it will prevent it from ever spinning down.

I just got my n66 today and installed the latest Merlin build.
It is working great except for my disk never stops spinning even though i have it set to spin down after 15 mins.

I have Download Master installed but I'm not downloading or seeding anything.

so if Download Master is installed, even if all my computers are off and there are no files downloading or seeding, the disk never stops spinning?

I really like the DM function, but I don't want my disk spinning 24/7.
What can I do?

 

[RMerlin]

I just got my n66 today and installed the latest Merlin build.
It is working great except for my disk never stops spinning even though i have it set to spin down after 15 mins.

I have Download Master installed but I'm not downloading or seeding anything.

so if Download Master is installed, even if all my computers are off and there are no files downloading or seeding, the disk never stops spinning?

I really like the DM function, but I don't want my disk spinning 24/7.
What can I do?

Download Master has various services that might access the disk, such as the aMule service. You would probably need to disable Download Master while not using it to really ensure it doesn't access the disk.

 

[pncu]

Download Master has various services that might access the disk, such as the aMule service. You would probably need to disable Download Master while not using it to really ensure it doesn't access the disk.

Thanks for the reply.
I'd be using it probably everyday and It'd be a hassle to diable and enable everyday.

The previous posts say something about each drive having a set number of spinup/down. so if it's always running it'll last longer?

So if I don't take electric bill into consideration, is it better to have the drive spinning 24/7 or have it stop once in awhile and rest overnight?

I use the drive every day, probably streaming about 3-4 hours of music/vids.

Sorry if these are dumb q's. I'd appreciate any help you can give me.

 

[RMerlin]

Thanks for the reply.
I'd be using it probably everyday and It'd be a hassle to diable and enable everyday.

The previous posts say something about each drive having a set number of spinup/down. so if it's always running it'll last longer?

So if I don't take electric bill into consideration, is it better to have the drive spinning 24/7 or have it stop once in awhile and rest overnight?

I use the drive every day, probably streaming about 3-4 hours of music/vids.

Sorry if these are dumb q's. I'd appreciate any help you can give me.

My personal opinion is that a hard disk that spins 24/7 should last long enough to reach a point where you would be replacing it anyway. Take a typical hard drive with a MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) of 100,000 hours. That means that if it runs fulltime, it should in theory last for more than 10 years.

So if you do use your drive actively on a daily basis and power/noise isn't an issue, there's no real harm in leaving it up 24/7.

As an example, I am replacing a customer's whole computer infratructure this week. First, I'm replacing 8 PCs. Those PCs I'm replacing runs at least 8 hours/day (I don't know if they turn them off at night), and I originally built these in... 2004. Of these 8, only one single hard drive has failed.

I am also replacing their Windows 2000 Server with a QNAP TurboNAS. That server has been running 24/7 with a pair of mirrored disks for over 8 years. Neither disks has failed yet.

It's pretty much a luck of the draw. If a disk dies after 3 years, then chances are it would have failed prematurely anyways.

 

[RMerlin]

Hi,

Certain "green" drives like WD have limited amount of start stop cycle (LLC is the acronym used I believe).

Are you sure you aren't thinking of TLER, which is a totally different thing?

WD Green HDDs will actually spindown a lot, since the firmware is very aggressive on power management. If left on their own, they will spin down by default after only a few mins, which DID cause issues for people using them in scenarios where the disk would end up doing many dozens of spinup/spindowns every day. If using them in such scenarios, WD has a tool that will let you modify that firmware parameter to avoid having the HDD spindown constantly.

 

[pncu]

Just thought I'd update.

I've been running the latest Merlin build for a couple days and I thought everything was great because on my computer everything was peachy.

My brother's on a Mac and even though the internet works for him, he can't download anything. When he tries to download files, the speed jumps every second from 200kbps to 600kbps then 2kbps then 150kbps and so on. the speed never stabilizes and just keeps jumping and nothing gets downloaded. It takes 10 hours to download what should take minutes.

I've tried to change channels, bandwith from 20 to 40 and both 5 and 2.4 bands.

It is also like this plugged wired into the router for his mac.

I wired it directly to the modem and it works perfect, it worked perfect with the e4200v2 we had before the n66u so I don't think it's the mac.
I think for some reason this router isn't working properly with the mac.

Any suggestions?

I had no idea using a router would be this complicated.
Can't just plug it in and expect it to work perfect...

 

[pncu]

on a side note, what write and read speed should I be getting from a NAS connected to the N66u through wired connection and not wireless?

I am only getting 4MB/s write speed wired and that is just bizarre to me. on the linksys e4200v2, i was getting 20-25...

 

[RMerlin]

on a side note, what write and read speed should I be getting from a NAS connected to the N66u through wired connection and not wireless?

I am only getting 4MB/s write speed wired and that is just bizarre to me. on the linksys e4200v2, i was getting 20-25...

A hard disk should give you 12-15 MB/s read speed on a wired connection. I never benchmarked write speed.

EDIT: Sorry, thought you meant plugged in USB disk. NAS performance will depend mostly on the NAS you use, so it can be anything from 20 MB/s (with a low-end NAS) up to around 90 MB/s (with a high-end NAS).

 

[2000wolf]

... I had no idea using a router would be this complicated.
Can't just plug it in and expect it to work perfect...

Some things in your network or at your clients / NAS seem to be totally wrong / misconfigured. ... or your router is dead on arrival.

Did you play with Jumbo Frames or with port trunking?

IMHO the OS of connected clients should be irrelevant. High throughput must be possible regardles of Linux / embedded Linux (NAS, multimediaplayer etc.), OS X or WIN.

 

[nubyOz]

on a side note, what write and read speed should I be getting from a NAS connected to the N66u through wired connection and not wireless?

I am only getting 4MB/s write speed wired and that is just bizarre to me. on the linksys e4200v2, i was getting 20-25...

Got my Synology DS212J with Version 4.1 DSM, 2 separate disks, no RAID.
Get about 50 MB/s read speed using wired NAS and Win7 client, write speed somewhat less. But not too much.

Wireless really depends on your wireless settings and location.
On my client (450 3x3 card ) using empty 5Ghz band, distance about 3m direct line, I get about 11MB/s read speed.

Cheers

 

[pncu]

Got my Synology DS212J with Version 4.1 DSM, 2 separate disks, no RAID.
Get about 50 MB/s read speed using wired NAS and Win7 client, write speed somewhat less. But not too much.

Wireless really depends on your wireless settings and location.
On my client (450 3x3 card ) using empty 5Ghz band, distance about 3m direct line, I get about 11MB/s read speed.

Cheers

Thanks for that info.
I'm not sure if Synology is a separate NAS system or it's hooked up to the n66u using n66u for access.

I'm using a seagate goflex drive through the router and I'm getting about 8MB/s both read and write speed using a wired connection... which is about a 3rd of what I got with e4200v2 and about half what Merlin says I should be getting.

frustrating... On top of that my dark knight doesn't play nice with mac's when it comes to bittorrent...

maybe I'll try Tomato... but man... I'm so noob and I'm afraid the features are going to be too complicated for me to get it working right.

All I wanted wanted was a solid connection for all my computers in a 5000sq ft home out of the box with no special features except maybe Download Master...

I guess I partly got what I needed... I do get solid range and connection throughout the home. just the bit torrent on mac and wired transfer rate.

Could this be faulty manufacturing? Or just firmware? Bought it from amazon market place and I'm not sure how RMA would work with them.

 

[nubyOz]

Thanks for that info.
I'm not sure if Synology is a separate NAS system or it's hooked up to the n66u using n66u for access.

I'm using a seagate goflex drive through the router and I'm getting about 8MB/s both read and write speed using a wired connection... which is about a 3rd of what I got with e4200v2 and about half what Merlin says I should be getting.

frustrating... On top of that my dark knight doesn't play nice with mac's when it comes to bittorrent...

maybe I'll try Tomato... but man... I'm so noob and I'm afraid the features are going to be too complicated for me to get it working right.

All I wanted wanted was a solid connection for all my computers in a 5000sq ft home out of the box with no special features except maybe Download Master...

I guess I partly got what I needed... I do get solid range and connection throughout the home. just the bit torrent on mac and wired transfer rate.

Could this be faulty manufacturing? Or just firmware? Bought it from amazon market place and I'm not sure how RMA would work with them.

My NAS is dedicated and hooked up via Gigabit to the router.
Also has it's own download service.
I really recommend a dedicated NAS.

 

[Tailhappy]

Re: slow date transfer using a Mac. If you're using OS X versions 10.7+ (Lion) you should definitely install MediaMaster Server from the Appstore. It's free and will improve your LAN data transfer rate considerably. Apple removed Samba and replaced it with their own inferior file sharing app.

 

[uncola]

I've noticed that if the power goes out for a while, my ac66u will go to firmware recovery mode, with the power led flashing slowly. and I have to use firmware recovery to get it working again. Is this a known problem? I didn't see anyone mention it

 

[RogerSC]

I've noticed that if the power goes out for a while, my ac66u will go to firmware recovery mode, with the power led flashing slowly. and I have to use firmware recovery to get it working again. Is this a known problem? I didn't see anyone mention it

A good way of dealing with this is to put your cable modem or dsl modem and your router on a UPS (uninterruptible power supply). A UPS provides protection from brown-outs, surges, and from short power outages. I've been doing this for several years now, and it has helped the stability of my home network when this sort of thing happens.

Doesn't answer the question of whether your router should be doing this, though...but does help stability. Since my router seldom sees power outages, cannot tell you what it does in this circumstance *smile*. However, it is true that routers usually only go into recovery mode when reset is pressed when the power comes on, so this sounds a little flaky to me.

 

[mikelanding]

I've noticed that if the power goes out for a while, my ac66u will go to firmware recovery mode, with the power led flashing slowly. and I have to use firmware recovery to get it working again. Is this a known problem? I didn't see anyone mention it

I had the exact same problem on my 1st unit. Tried many firmware and problem still persist.
I send to Warranty Claim. Asus sent me a new replacement set. Now dont have this problem.
Would suggest you do the same

 

[mangatanga]

I've had my rt-66r for two weeks and the first week and a half it was pretty solid with no issues other than my slow usb read/writes. I don't get cable in my area so my house is full of streaming players and I was impressed at how stable the wireless is and all my clients are working properly.

I installed merlin's new release two days ago to see some of the other features especially telnet/ssh into the router. Worked great for the first 24 hours or so and than I started seeing some wifi slowness here and there most notably on my streaming because most the content is 720p or higher resolution via the internet. It was also noticeable on local network wireless transfers. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary as far as memory/cpu. I also had my internet just die at one point yesterday and although everything showed fine in the ui/cli and I could ping my next hop (pppoe connection) I couldn't route past it until I disabled/re-enabled my wan connection.

For now I decided to reflash the asus fw and see if things go back to being stable w/out these few snags I hit.

From reading it appears the asus fw that is out right now might have more up to date wireless drivers than merlin's build and that could be why I had wifi weirdness. I also have the xbox 360 slim wireless problem I've read about in other posts so thats the only client I have that doesn't work well at all.

I do like the extra stuff you get in merlin's code but I need to see which fw is better for my wireless needs. One thing that is cool is that the router still has telnet enabled after flashing back to the asus fw so I have access to it via cli. I don't really understand these routers as far as the OS/fw well but I thought installing fw was like a reimage but apparently not since it retained that setting.

 

[pncu]

A hard disk should give you 12-15 MB/s read speed on a wired connection. I never benchmarked write speed.

EDIT: Sorry, thought you meant plugged in USB disk. NAS performance will depend mostly on the NAS you use, so it can be anything from 20 MB/s (with a low-end NAS) up to around 90 MB/s (with a high-end NAS).

Sorry, I meant plugged in USB disk. Its just a seagate goflex drive plugged into the usb slot. It has super slow read and write speed. When I try to access it through wired connection, I get 5-8MB/s read and write speed on your build.

I tried Tomato Shibby and I get 2.5MB/s write speed 5-8MB/s read speed.

Very slow... I didn't really mess with any settings that I know of that would affect usb transfer speeds like that.

It takes way to long to upload files to the network drive. I'm going to exchange for a new one if I can... and see if that helps.

Total bummer cause range is really great.

 

[pncu]

Is it possible to install something like transmission for torrents on Merlin build?

Download Master never lets my HDD spin down but on Tomato, the using transmission to dl, my drive still spun down when idle.