Does a thumb drive plugged into a router's USB port count as NAS?

[SumGuy]

I have no experience with file reading / file writing to thumb drives (or even USB hard drives) plugged into the USB port of what seem to be many different routers available today.

Does such a file-storage solution count as NAS? Does it have all the same accessibility / visibility (protocals, samba or what-ever) as a large dedicated NAS box but perhaps not with the same performance?

 

[sfx2000]

USB drive sharing offered by most consumer oriented routers is fairly basic - Samba and perhaps a DLNA media server...

If needs are simple, it may be sufficient...

A dedicated NAS from Synology or QNAP (or others) will have better performance, more flexibility, more storage and application options, and generally is a better choice.

 

[SumGuy]

I'm wondering if a USB-attached hard drive on a router (the vast majority seem to be USB-2) would be sufficient for one or two network IP cameras to record short episodic events (like motion detection) in 4k (H.264 or H.265) video. That's about all I'd want to use such a USB drive for. (these would be IP cameras connected via cat-5 ethernet directly to the router)

 

[thiggins]

Depends on the router and the speed of the camera stream. The IP cams would also need to be able to write to a network share or FTP server.

Write throughput to a USB 2.0 / NTFS drive is typically in the 20-30 MB/s range (160-240 Mbps).
https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/tools/charts/router/bar/169-ntfs-write-usb-2-0/31

 

[RMerlin]

Depends on the router and the speed of the camera stream. The IP cams would also need to be able to write to a network share or FTP server.

Write throughput to a USB 2.0 / NTFS drive is typically in the 20-30 MB/s range (160-240 Mbps).
https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/tools/charts/router/bar/169-ntfs-write-usb-2-0/31

That can also drop to around 12-15 MB/s if the router has a weak CPU and the firmware only uses the open-sourced NTFS-3G driver (which has pretty poor performance compared to native ext2 or commercial solutions from Paragon and Tuxera).

If that's the case, I'd recommend going with ext2 instead, for improved performance.

 

[sfx2000]

I'm wondering if a USB-attached hard drive on a router (the vast majority seem to be USB-2) would be sufficient for one or two network IP cameras to record short episodic events (like motion detection) in 4k (H.264 or H.265) video. That's about all I'd want to use such a USB drive for. (these would be IP cameras connected via cat-5 ethernet directly to the router)

Probably not - bit rates on Network IP cams can be fairly high, and it's a constant load with some - the Samba process on consumer AP/Routers is going to take up CPU cycles, and even with dual core Cortex-A9's that we see with current AC1900 and above, it'll hit other important services.

Synology and QNAP - they have dedicated IP camera servers that can be installed, and in most cases, you'll have more storage available, and that storage will be faster - e.g. SATA vs. USB.

Even a single bay NAS is going to be a better solution here than running shared USB storage on a Router/AP in this use case...

 

[TonyH]

I'm wondering if a USB-attached hard drive on a router (the vast majority seem to be USB-2) would be sufficient for one or two network IP cameras to record short episodic events (like motion detection) in 4k (H.264 or H.265) video. That's about all I'd want to use such a USB drive for. (these would be IP cameras connected via cat-5 ethernet directly to the router)

I have no experience with file reading / file writing to thumb drives (or even USB hard drives) plugged into the USB port of what seem to be many different routers available today.

Does such a file-storage solution count as NAS? Does it have all the same accessibility / visibility (protocals, samba or what-ever) as a large dedicated NAS box but perhaps not with the same performance?

NAS has it's own OS. To minimize frustration, installing NAS is good idea like a 2 bay unit.