I'll try to keep it short but this is a good story.

[jph1589]

The first time I came to this forum I was at my wits end with ASUS support. I had purchased an RT-AC3100 last fall and had nothing but problems. I won't go into it all but the firmware was awful and their support was even worse.

Then I found this forum and signed up and asked some questions and read about experiences and issues. I have been completely blown away by how helpful everyone has been here. I had an issue with my IOS devices hogging all the upstream bandwidth during backups to iCloud and my way of fixing it was by limiting the bandwidth of those specific devices. But of course ASUS broke that feature in the firmware update last fall and I had to go back to Aug 2016 firmware to get it to work. That fixed the issue with my IOS devices but left me out of he loop on any fixes or upgrades made since then.

So a couple of days ago I decided to take the plunge and install the Merlin firmware on my router. Of course it worked just as advertised. I was up and running with real stable firmware in 5 minutes. We beat up the network with everything we could throw at it for 48 hours and nobody in the house has had one issue.

Then I got brave and turned off the bandwidth limiter on my IOS devices. They have been backing up to the cloud with no issues whatsoever. I am so happy I can't stand myself. For the last 6 months I felt like the IT guy in our house always fixing network issues. Now I can actually breath and enjoy this.

So today I bought a WD 3tb My Book external drive and plugged it into the router's USB 3.0 port. I set it up as a shared device for our network and put all our pictures and videos and my itunes library on it. Again it works perfectly. The only issue was that ASUS cant use the exFat format of the drive so I had to reformat it NTFS. No big deal.

So for all of you folks out there who have benefited from this forum and Merlin, hit the donate button up above this and tell him how much we appreciate this.

 

[paulbates]

I have this router as well. I started with the AC68, and then moved to this one for its 8 ports to simplify wired iot sprawl and to get additional processor power. I have an 512GB SSD plugged into mine and it works great. I'm using NTFS and use the SMB2 setting on (Tools/other settings).

I recently started using an OpenVPN service for most of my devices and it handles that well too. Its a real workhorse, and Merlin's software maximizes everything that it can do.

Thanks for the positive write up.

Paul

 

[joegreat]

Then I found this forum and signed up and asked some questions and read about experiences and issues. I have been completely blown away by how helpful everyone has been here.
...
So for all of you folks out there who have benefited from this forum and Merlin, hit the donate button up above this and tell him how much we appreciate this.

Thank you very much for your positive feedback! People tend to forget to give positive feedback - complains and issues are the dominating type of feedback...

Good to hear that the forum is still as helpful as it was in my case when I joined 2013 (my first Asus was an RT-N16 - still alive)!

The advanced usage of my routers (see footer) would not be possible without this great forum.

 

[thelonelycoder]

As @joegreat writes, my Ad-blocker would not run on thousands and thousands of routers without @RMerlin putting his mind and skills into this project.
Add to that a great supporting community and @thiggins providing the infrastructure and you have a unique place to spend hours on.

 

[Gregory Phillips]

I must concur that without Merlin's work on this router it would not be able to function at this level of usefulness.