Router w/ USB HDD Wifi Overhead

[prom3theus]

Good evening everyone,

I've been browsing the forums for a while but this is my first time posting Hope the real NAS guys don't mind if I post a silly router/hard drive question here, but I figured it was more relevant to NAS than to routers themselves.

From browsing, I've learned that 1) wifi speeds come with a lot of overhead, and 2) you'll never get the performance of a true NAS enclosure from this new trend of routers touting USB ports. However, money is tight for me, and I don't have a ton of expertise in this area, so for simply moving files between machines I figured this would be a decent alternative until I can afford a real NAS. Based primarily on this review (noting, for example, 99.5 MBytes/s NTFS write speed), I purchased a Linksys WRT1200AC. So far, the router itself is working wonderfully!

However, I plugged my trusty 1TB WD Passport USB 3.0 (the one that doesn't need external power) into it and tried to copy a large move file from my laptop over to it. My laptop is connecting to the router via it's Intel Advanced-N 6235 adapter (I know, it's not AC, my gf's is though!), which Windows is telling me is running at 300Mbps. The transfer is running at 487 KB/s! There are so many variables, I don't know what to diagnose.

Do you think this most likely means that:
1) my hard drive is not really connecting to the router with USB 3.0 because it's one of those weird kinds that doesn't require a power adapter?
2) my router is crawling (even though the reviewer attained 99.5MB/s NTFS write)? I did notice that, during the attempted transfer, my browsing speed slowed waaay down.
2.5) if the answer to #2 is yes, does this mean that people usually test this sort of thing over the wired gigabit connections? Seems to me that wouldn't provide a very meaningful comparison between routers with different wireless technologies.
3) my 802.11n laptop is experiencing a tremendous amount of overhead?

Thanks in advance for your time and have a good day! (Edit: fixed review link, sorry.)

 

[htismaqe]

You could eliminate wireless as a potential cause by plugging both computers directly into the switch via ethernet cables. That would point the finger at either the wireless or the drive, but not both, allowing you to further troubleshoot from there.

 

[prom3theus]

htismage, I should have done that from the beginning! I guess I just assumed that the reviewer would have tested attached storage over wireless. In any case, I plugged the laptop in, opened a folder attached to the router, and tried the copy again. This time, the transfer jumped up to a respectable 60 MB/s. Does this mean I can assume two things:

1) that my WD drive is not the fastest USB 3.0 drive out there, and
2) that my wireless-N laptop is not ideal for large file transfers?

In other words, I think it's safe to assume that the router is working as expected. I was just thrown by the several orders of magnitude difference between expectation and reality.

 

[htismaqe]

Yeah, I think the router is performing as expected. You could take it one step further and transfer a file wirelessly between the two computers - that would benchmark your wireless.

 

[stevech]

Routers run Linux.
Linux's drivers for NTFS, esp. for writes, are better than they used to be, but still far, far slower than ext4/native.

A router makes an OK file server, for small files.

 

[azazel1024]

WHERE are you testing from for the wireless performance. It is impacted by range, so if you are across your house, hundreds of KB/sec isn't necessarily bad performance, especially if the client has a crappy wireless adapter.

One other thing to check with the Intel adapter, see if it is the latest drivers for it. Then disable UAPSD under the driver properties for the wireless adapter. I have had issues on SEVERAL intel wireless adapters with this enabled. Generally with QCA based routers. Causes wireless performance to slow to a crawl (though 400KB/sec is rather exceptionally slow, I generally see 3-5MB/sec, but then again I did that testing in the same room close to the router. Disable it and I see >>>20MB/sec wireless performance).