multiple flash drives on one AC68U USB port works well

[RussellInCincinnati]

Pleasant to see that plugging a $20 US dollar Connectland/Syba USB 3.0 hub, with 3 USB external drives on it, into the RT-AC68U results in a nice drop-down list of Samba-share-able storage volumes. Screenshot attached. USB printers show up and work too, see my note below.

The heavy metal Mushkin Ventura Ultra is a power-hog of a USB drive. It won't work when plugged directly into the 'AC68U router's USB 3.0 port. But the Mushkin, and a couple of other USB-interface external hard drives, all show up fine when connected to a Connectland hub. This hub in turn plugged into the router's single USB 3 port. Using 2014 December ..49 Merlin firmware.

Also nice that a really old, power-mad Maxtor One Touch external 3.5 inch drive, and equally ancient Western Digital My Book drive, and an external Hitachi 1 terabyte box, are put to sleep promptly when not in use. As commanded by the nice Merlin option for Disk Spindown Idle Time, within the Tools/Other Settings menu page.

Thanks to all including "Engineer" for guiding us through converting a (free to Tmobile users) TMobile TMAC1900 router into an 'AC68U Merlin machine (http://slickdeals.net/forums/showpost.php?p=70991738&postcount=2576).

 

[RMerlin]

You probably got lucky, because Asuswrt only supports USB 2.0 hubs. Most USB 3.0 hubs don't work as they would require additional kernel level support.

Basic (2.0) HUB support was added by Asus about a year ago.

 

[RussellInCincinnati]

RMerlin:You probably got lucky, because Asuswrt only supports USB 2.0 hubs.

Am not completely lucky. As John9527 advised below, have verified that am not getting true USB 3.0 performance through the USB 3.0 hub. The 3 USB connections/paths displayed from the SSH shell "nvram show" command are all at 480Mbps USB 2.0 speed.

So the Mushkin USB 3 flash drive merely functions properly at USB 2.0 speed (30.5 megabytes per second) through the Connectland USB 3 hub. Will still check this week on the 0.001 percent chance that a Patriot Magnum flash drive will connect "better".

RMerlin it is also interesting that with my Win 8 clients and Samba 2 on the AC68U, the read caching of files is superb when reading a 300 megabyte file off of the Mushkin Ventura Ultra USB 3 drive. I.e. the first read takes 11 seconds, the second read takes about 1 second.

The same file being read through the same USB 3 hub from old Maxtor and Western Digital 3.5 inch USB 2.0 drive enclosures, shows no evidence of being cached at all. Haven't quite decided why this might be.

 

[john9527]

One thing to take a look at.....do

nvram show | grep _speed

and it will show the usb connections and what speed the router believes they are...480 for USB2 and 5000 for USB3.

 

[RussellInCincinnati]

Thanks as usual John9527, the AC68U USB 3.0 connection speeds are merely 480, even to a Mushkin Ventura Ultra USB 3.0 flash drive. Great read caching though, with Windows 8.1/Samba v2 clients repeatedly scanning files on the Mushkin.

Have done a bit of pondering about arguments for and against Asus supporting high-speed storage in their WiFi routers. The arguments against it include so many users having no idea or valuing that their WiFi routers could serve as a tiny NAS/local file server. And why should Asus let a $170 US dollar router increasingly compete with their own $212 dollar NAS Networked Attached Storage appliances?

On the pro side, every year there seems to be closer and closer to enough computing power and memory in the top Asus routers to do a bit of NAS file serving (a small number of simple Samba connections) adequately. Particularly if you don't ask the router to be a DLNA or other type of encoding media server. And if you ignore the zillion other things even the cheapest $90 dollar QNAP TS-120 NAS does besides a couple of Samba shares.

 

[john9527]

longshot....but do you have the 'Reduce USB 3 Interference' disabled on the 2.4 GHz Wireless/Professional tab?

 

[RussellInCincinnati]

thanks for asking, am not "Reducing USB 3 Interference"

longshot....but do you have the 'Reduce USB 3 Interference' disabled on the 2.4 GHz Wireless/Professional tab?

Well triple-checked just now, because have indeed done a bunch of resets. Sadly the Reduce Interference setting is already disabled. Onward to testing the Patriot USB 3.

 

[noric]

Basic (2.0) HUB support was added by Asus about a year ago.

It looks I can't get a 3g dongle to work if I use a usb Y splitter cable. Not even if I don't connect anything else to the other branch of the Y (this is to exclude power starvation).
This is what I see in the log when I plug the 3g dongle in the Y cable:

Dec 29 15:06:42 kernel: usb 1-1.1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 9
Dec 29 15:06:42 kernel: usb 1-1.1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
Dec 29 15:06:42 kernel: usb 1-1.1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
Dec 29 15:06:42 kernel: usb 1-1.1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 10
Dec 29 15:06:42 kernel: usb 1-1.1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
Dec 29 15:06:42 kernel: usb 1-1.1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
Dec 29 15:06:43 kernel: usb 1-1.1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 11
Dec 29 15:06:43 kernel: usb 1-1.1: device not accepting address 11, error -71
Dec 29 15:06:43 kernel: usb 1-1.1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 12
Dec 29 15:06:44 kernel: usb 1-1.1: device not accepting address 12, error -71
Dec 29 15:06:44 kernel: hub 1-1:1.0: unable to enumerate USB device on port 1

Could my cable be at fault? Or is my older firmware (374.40) unable to cope with Y cables?
Thanks.

 

[RMerlin]

It looks I can't get a 3g dongle to work if I use a usb Y splitter cable. Not even if I don't connect anything else to the other branch of the Y (this is to exclude power starvation).
This is what I see in the log when I plug the 3g dongle in the Y cable:

Dec 29 15:06:42 kernel: usb 1-1.1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 9
Dec 29 15:06:42 kernel: usb 1-1.1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
Dec 29 15:06:42 kernel: usb 1-1.1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
Dec 29 15:06:42 kernel: usb 1-1.1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 10
Dec 29 15:06:42 kernel: usb 1-1.1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
Dec 29 15:06:42 kernel: usb 1-1.1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
Dec 29 15:06:43 kernel: usb 1-1.1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 11
Dec 29 15:06:43 kernel: usb 1-1.1: device not accepting address 11, error -71
Dec 29 15:06:43 kernel: usb 1-1.1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 12
Dec 29 15:06:44 kernel: usb 1-1.1: device not accepting address 12, error -71
Dec 29 15:06:44 kernel: hub 1-1:1.0: unable to enumerate USB device on port 1

Could my cable be at fault? Or is my older firmware (374.40) unable to cope with Y cables?
Thanks.

You can't use a Y cable to plug two devices, you need a hub.

 

[RussellInCincinnati]

nice work RMerlin, USB printer works too, Connectland USB 3 hub

Pleasant to see that plugging a $20 US dollar Connectland/Syba USB 3.0 hub, with 3 USB external drives on it...

A plain old Brother HL-2040 USB printer works well, too. It shows up on the USB 3.0 status dropdown (Merlin GUI) just like another hard disk. Impressive to see the Merlin GUI show the printer ID string as "Brother HL-2040 Series." And no special printing software needed for Windows, just installed as a TCP/IP LPR printer port per Asus instructions.

So now it's pretty easy to, say, hang 2 networked hard drives and 3 printers off of the little router with the help of a $20 dollar USB hub.

Noted that if you pull out the USB printer cable from some port of the hub (while everything powered up and active), and plug that cable into another port of that hub, the printer becomes unreachable from Windows until you reboot the router. That makes sense to me as reasonable behavior.

Also interesting (in an impractical geeky way) to see that after doing an "nvram show | grep speed" , the speed of the USB connection to the printer (through a cheap, long USB cable) is not 480 (USB 2.0) but instead merely 12 megabits per second (USB 1). Even 12Mbps is plenty of speed for my typical non-graphical printing.

 

[noric]

You can't use a Y cable to plug two devices, you need a hub.

You're right, it doesn't work with usb keys either. Thanks RMerlin. Why is that so, out of curiosity?

 

[RMerlin]

You're right, it doesn't work with usb keys either. Thanks RMerlin. Why is that so, out of curiosity?

Same reason you can't use a "splitter" to plug two Ethernet cables into a port. An USB cable doesn't just carry an analog signal (like audio or video), it's digital data. You need a hub to manage the traffic between multiple devices to a host.

 

[noric]

Same reason you can't use a "splitter" to plug two Ethernet cables into a port. An USB cable doesn't just carry an analog signal (like audio or video), it's digital data. You need a hub to manage the traffic between multiple devices to a host.

With my splitter it looks like it doesn't work even when I plug only one device in it (i.e. I leave a branch of the splitter empty and in the other branch I plug a usb key). I just tested this on my windows pc too.
Is my cable faulty or are these cables completely useless?

 

[RMerlin]

With my splitter it looks like it doesn't work even when I plug only one device in it (i.e. I leave a branch of the splitter empty and in the other branch I plug a usb key). I just tested this on my windows pc too.
Is my cable faulty or are these cables completely useless?

Those Y-shaped cables are usually used so you can plug a device to two separate USB ports, where one provides the data + power, and the other branch only provides additional power. Those are common for small HDD enclosures that are USB-powered.

 

[RussellInCincinnati]

So now it's pretty easy to, say, hang 2 networked hard drives and 3 printers off of the little router with the help of a $20 dollar USB hub.

Have verified that a $30 dollar Connectland DOCK-3UBT3 (also SYBA CL-ENC50038)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817801093

dual-hard-disk-drive-dock works at USB 3.0 speeds to allow you to plug a couple of SATA (I,II,III) hard drives into a Merlin RT-AC68u router, using the router USB 3.0 port. The dock supports at least 4 terabyte, and GPT-partition, hard disks.

The Syba/Connectland drive dock makes the "cheapest and lowest-power possible 2 hard disk NAS" one could make out of an Asus RT-AC68u router. As via-USB Networked Attached Storage devices, the Asus routers are about as low end as one could have...though at least Merlin has made it possible to use Samba version 2 for file-sharing. Hmm would I dare having more than a couple of users do anything but simplest tasks on this "fileserver"...

The Samba file copy speeds to or from a typical NTFS-format consumer laptop hard drive (connected via the USB 3 port) are not particularly fast, 52 megabytes per second, but they are at least faster than is possible with a USB 2.0 hard drive.

Unfortunately could not make this particular Connectland/Syba docking station hard disk show up as mounted in the Merlin firmware screens, when connected through the inexpensive Connectland/Syba USB 3.0 hub mentioned at the top of this thread. I.e. the docking station (with up to 2 hard disks in it) only functions when plugged directly into the USB 3.0 router port.

So now have worked out inexpensive ways to add both USB 3 flash drives (Patriot Magnum ext2 format), and NTFS-format hard drives (through Syba dock), that make a Merlin RT-AC68u (or reflashed T-mobile TMAC1900) about as good a NAS as it can be. This valuable knowledge and 50 cents may buy me a cup of coffee some day.

Guess adding a flash drive or simple docking station to a WiFi router you were going to run anyway, is the lowest power consumption networked attached storage one could possibly add to a WiFi'd network. To that end the fanless Syba dock only has a faint touch of warmth on its bottom plate after many minutes of continuous, max-speed file streaming. Too, have had good success with the Merlin software feature to spin down/idle old USB-enclosure (Maxtor, Western Digital) hard drives after XX number of seconds of disuse.

 

[voipair]

Glad i found this post and great find and thanks for testing RussellInCincinnati. i was searching for usb 3 hubs to buy for the ac68u but they are so expensive, and couldn't find any benchmarks to explain wild variations in price not that they would have worked anyways.

Can we install the /jffs partition onto one of the had drives in the dock ?
This might provide for entware and chroot programs;
faster speed
better reliability
better swap - It would be great if swap on ssd could be good enough to provide a lower speed but still usable RAM upgrade.

Proposed architecture - Set up Syba with one high capacity platter drive and a 60g ssd drive, use all of ssd for jffs and swap. Connect usb hub to the 2.0 port (third hdd for local backup, etc) - What would the max number of ports that the ac68u will support?

I think i read on another post that when one drive is accessed they both spin up, not sure how bad that is for platter drive if os type programs are constantly accessed on ssd

ps i am assuming usb3 is better for os type operations, all i could find online praised the max speed but couldn't locate any other specs.

 

[RMerlin]

Glad i found this post and great find and thanks for testing RussellInCincinnati. i was searching for usb 3 hubs to buy for the ac68u but they are so expensive, and couldn't find any benchmarks to explain wild variations in price not that they would have worked anyways.

Can we install the /jffs partition onto one of the had drives in the dock ?
This might provide for entware and chroot programs;
faster speed
better reliability
better swap - It would be great if swap on ssd could be good enough to provide a lower speed but still usable RAM upgrade.

I think you misunderstand what the jffs partition is for. Having it on a USB disk will provide zero performance improvement to Entware, and has absolutely nothing to do with swap either.

 

[voipair]

I think you misunderstand what the jffs

Yes i did - totally not related, searched and learned thanks (at your github)
I suppose i may have hijacked the thread as mine is more of a design question, but it is specific to ac68u router, your firmware and this disk bay.
I think the other improvements might still be possible with ssd hdd instead of thumbdrive - but i don't know if correct.

i bought two refurbs for 154.95 CAD now that i have crashplan running on it I am finalizing the parts for inexpensive backup/home nas/router, so would be great to choose best setup before i buy the wrong parts.

 

[voipair]

So then I need to modify my idea and what I now want to ask is
If we mount a partition on the external ssd hdd plugged into one of the bays of the SYBA CL-ENC5003 while plugged into the usb 3.0 port (install entware here) and put the swap partitionor file on same ssd hdd.
Would that give us any performance / stability benefits (see list in previous post) over usb thumbdrive for any programs we run