RT-AC68U and external HDD

[bbunge]

Have swap on a fat32 USB and a 1TB WD Green drive connected to the other USB slot. File transfer speed is as good to the USB drive as it is to my WD NAS. I let the drive enclosure take care of spinning the drive down. Router is an AC66U B1.

 

[latenitetech]

Sorry, but it looks like using USB stick via USB hub together with printer is a really bad idea. And I suspect USB hub is a bad idea at all.

Sorry your hub isn't working, but I don't think it's legit to condemn the concept. Many people report success with USB hubs here. I think some chip sets just work better than others with the router. The first hub I tried was a "dollar store" no-name 4-port USB2 hub. It would never connect on boot (throwing errors similar to what you showed). However if I popped it out, and plugged it back in after the router was fully up, it seemed to work OK. I replaced it with a more legit Belkin brand 4-port USB2 hub. It has been error free. Always comes up on boot, and I've had 3x USB flashdrives + a USB->serial port adapter all at once and all worked trouble free. My normal config is a 256G flash drive and that USB->serial adapter on the Belkin hub on the router's USB2 port and it works flawlessly.

I'm not saying using a hub makes sense for you, especially given your desire to keep your HDD on the faster port, but just saying USB2 hubs can and do work on this router.

 

[latenitetech]

Ah, crap - same errors while scanning HDD:
At least I will not obtain errors due to minidlna DB.

I'm assuming you still haven't addressed the swap file issue. I don't think you'll ever get to end-of-game on the disk check until you do.

As for the minidlna config, I think you may have made it worse. Putting the database in RAM just means that much less RAM for the processor to use. You have so little to work with to start, tying up that much with a static DB file just seems crazy. I respectfully disagree with that trick you came upon.

Here's my recommendation:
1) Set up a 4G EXT3 filesystem at the tail of your HDD like I suggested above. Install Entware, a swapfile and put your minidlna DB there.
2) Allow the swap to be active while you're running your disk check, and when doing the initial minidlna database build. You should be able to get to end-of-game with both the disk check and your minidlna DB creation.
3) Once you've got a stable system, disable the swap file (swapoff /opt/swap). Then you won't have the issue with the swap file being active when your disk spins down.

It's a bit more cumbersome because you'll have to manually manage when swap is on or off, but I think you can accomplish all you're trying to do, while keeping the HDD on the USB3 port, and not using a USB hub.

Just my 2 cents ...

 

[gjf]

OK, looks like the problem was with USB stick, not the Hub. Found old 1 Gb USB stick and looks like it works. I have created 512 M swap on it and added 5 Gb ext3 partition at the end of my HDD.
Then I installed Entware on HDD.
Now it looks like everything is working.

The only question: will Transmission from Entware affect on spinning down of HDD like it was with Download Master? Because of that I have to switch off DM every time torrents are finished from router web interface. In the case of Transmission it could be a challenge.

Sure "Stop seeding at ratio 0" was set as well as:

    "ratio-limit": 0,
    "ratio-limit-enabled": true,
    "idle-seeding-limit": 30,
    "idle-seeding-limit-enabled": true,

 

[latenitetech]

OK, looks like the problem was with USB stick, not the Hub. Found old 1 Gb USB stick and looks like it works. I have created 512 M swap on it and added 5 Gb ext3 partition at the end of my HDD.
Then I installed Entware on HDD.
Now it looks like everything is working.

Congrats! Glad you now have a working config.

The only question: will Transmission from Entware affect on spinning down of HDD like it was with Download Master? Because of that I have to switch off DM every time torrents are finished from router web interface. In the case of Transmission it could be a challenge.

It may well work OK, it just depends if the drive spins up fast enough on demand to keep the requesting app happy. I'd say just try it and see.

On the other hand, now that you see that a USB flash drive can work in your environment, you might just want to go pick up an 8G flashdrive and install entware on it instead (and of course swap as well). Transmission will then run off the flashdrive, so it won't be impacted by the spin down problem. 8G flashdrives can be had for under $5 these days, so it's not a cost issue.

You have lots of options now, and lots of tools in your toolkit. I'm sure you'll arrive at a solid config that addresses all your previous issues.

 

[john9527]

One other hint for running large drives on the later firmware levels. When you format the drive, change the cluster size from the default of 4K to 16K or even 32K. This reduces the memory requirements for router to support it.

 

[gjf]

Yeah, and it looks like spin down function is working properly also ))))