RT-N66U hangs/crash on large files transfer?

[kneerlax]

Bought this router yesterday and soon after setting it up I ran into te problem of large/long duration file transfers causing the router to crash. The harddrive connected is a 2TB Buffalo disk with USB2 and its own power supply, freshly formatted NTFS.

The transfers run fine for a few minutes untill around 5 Gigabytes gets transfered. After that the transfer hangs, and router crashes, Internet is still accessible but the router webUI does not respond. The transfers would Max at about 10MB/s.

The router feels very warm, even hot to the touch, at first I thought overheating, I live in a hot climate. Ambient temperature inside of 32 celcius is typical.

I blast the air conditioner at full power, aim a large fan at the routers back, reformatted the drive because the router said it now had errors according to the router and started another attempt at uploading files to the USB attached HDD.

In the webUI I keep an eye on the CPU / RAM loads. The moment the file transfer starts the CPU jumps to 100% and does not dip down again.

With the extra cooling it is now getting the router stays very cool to the touch, but still crashes after some Gigabytes of continuous flow has been pushed to the harddrive. The RAM seems to have no problems and doesn't go over 80% use.

This problem occurs with FTP and using the samba service. Files I uploafed were photos, music and home videos, mostly smaller files. I use FileZilla for my FTP client and TeraCopy when transferring by network share.

Firmware should be the latest, after initial setup I got prompted to update, which I did immediately.

Currently at work, when I get home I will try some of the tips I read here, is there anything else to try? I don't want to run non-official Firmware since if this function does not work I will probably just return it for a refund, or can I assume this router is broken and an exchange for a new one might fix?

 

[nemesis122]

exactly the same problem

Hi i have exactly the same problem.
any tips fro me ?
thank you

Michael

 

[msb]

It is a common misconception that this type of issue is due to heat. When electronic components fail due to heat, they are destroyed. I'm guessing you are dealing with some type of memory overflow issue due to software coding issues.

 

[sci666]

same problems

hello, i have the same problems ! i bought this router on ebay because i want a cheap media server with my old 2.5 inch HDD.

i tried to but the router always crashed after a while copying data to the external USB HDD (via cable not wifi)

it happens with big files bur also with a serial download of smaler files 100mb+

it crashed , network link to HDD is no longer available, router is no longer accessable via browser. but wlan still remains and i can surf the web ....

win explorer hangs while usb drive is mounted as network drive

so i have to do a hard reset (power off/on at the router)

what can i do here ??? i used the latest merlin firmware.

is thera any other firmware that works with external HDD ?

 

[huotg01]

hello, i have the same problems ! i bought this router on ebay because i want a cheap media server with my old 2.5 inch HDD.

i tried to but the router always crashed after a while copying data to the external USB HDD (via cable not wifi)

it happens with big files bur also with a serial download of smaler files 100mb+

it crashed , network link to HDD is no longer available, router is no longer accessable via browser. but wlan still remains and i can surf the web ....

win explorer hangs while usb drive is mounted as network drive

so i have to do a hard reset (power off/on at the router)

what can i do here ??? i used the latest merlin firmware.

is thera any other firmware that works with external HDD ?

Still talking about RT-n66u ?
What is the disk formatting of your usb disk: ntfs, FAT, ?
Have you monitor the System Status on the homepage at the same time the transfer is going on ? What is the memory usage like ? The CPU ?

 

[sci666]

yes RT-n66u !

its an NTFS 250 GB 2.5 inch hdd.

no i havent monitor the Log while copying... router simply crashed. Drive is no longer available in downloadmanager programm and so on...

i downgrade the firmware back to 3.0.0.4.276 and this firmware works !

HDD is completely functional !

but why ?

is the latest firmware , even the merlin buggy with the HDD support ?

 

[huotg01]

yes RT-n66u !

its an NTFS 250 GB 2.5 inch hdd.

no i havent monitor the Log while copying... router simply crashed. Drive is no longer available in downloadmanager programm and so on...

i downgrade the firmware back to 3.0.0.4.276 and this firmware works !

HDD is completely functional !

but why ?

is the latest firmware , even the merlin buggy with the HDD support ?

The usual advice would be to reset completely the router to make sure that there is no older variables affecting the router.

I think that at a point the ntfs "api" were changed (after .43 in RMerlin).
If you are ready to try something else: http://forums.smallnetbuilder.com/showthread.php?t=18914

 

[woland]

Hey, the same issue. Can not finish backup to usb drive. Drive disappeares and no access to web ui. Any solution? Looks like asus even not trying to fix this for years.

 

[Bambalacul]

Hi, I have similar problem. Now I eliminate upper cover and install one fan. Start to work better but have some indication issues when temperature drop low (network indication disappear, wireless and few more).

 

[eismcsquare]

Sorry for reviving this old thread, but it seems it doesn't want to die.

I am facing the same problem. Copying even one file (around 30MB) from my pc to an sd card mounted on one of the two usb inputs fails. The copy operation continues for a while (copying around 24MB) and then fails with Connection Time Out error message. By this time, the wireless connection is lost. The router is restarting itself.

I tried looking at syslog / dmesg, but can't find anything relevant.

I am on Asuswrt-Merlin 378.56_2.

 

[flytiger]

I am having similar issue on ac66u, I am on latest merlin firmware (380.57_0). Either transfer big file from/to usb disk (ntfs) or transfer huge amount of files over network to my NAS (transfer rate is close to Gbps), the router just hangs randomly. Is this model specific problem? I am considering upgrade to ac88u if it has no such problem.