Whats are Pro and Cons connecting a external hardisk to wireless router

[stevech]

It's been a while (several months) since I had a look at it but if I recall correct I didn't even find the options to enable file and printer sharing, only home groups. The settings screen looked completely different from the ones on my laptop, I had them side by side to try to mimic my laptops settings on her laptop.

Nope. I have Homegroups off in Win 7. Am able to create and use shares from other windows, Linux, and NAS. I used to share a USB printer but now my printer uses Ethernet/WiFi and is visible to all. My NAS has software to make the printer appear to the iPad since Apple won't joint the standards.

 

[Nerre]

And you are talking about Windows 7 Home? Not Pro?

Because googling the issue I've found dozens and dozens of posts stating that people have problems with Windows 7 Home.

Here are a few

http://www.tannerwilliamson.com/2009/09/14/windows-7-seven-network-file-sharing-fix-samba-smb/

http://www.windows7home.net/fix-cant-connect-to-samba-shares-issue-windows-7/

http://www.sevenforums.com/network-sharing/3737-samba-network-share-issue-windows-7-a-2.html

 

[azazel1024]

And you are talking about Windows 7 Home? Not Pro?

Because googling the issue I've found dozens and dozens of posts stating that people have problems with Windows 7 Home.

Here are a few

http://www.tannerwilliamson.com/2009/09/14/windows-7-seven-network-file-sharing-fix-samba-smb/

http://www.windows7home.net/fix-cant-connect-to-samba-shares-issue-windows-7/

http://www.sevenforums.com/network-sharing/3737-samba-network-share-issue-windows-7-a-2.html

Yes, he is talking about home. I had Windows 7 home on my laptop for well over a year and had no issues accessing network shares on it. I also a few times setup a shared folder on the laptop to access from another machine on my network. No issues. Zero home group usage.

Also if you check those links, they are specifically refering to SAMBA, not a general SMB share. Old versions of Samba CAN have some issues. This is why some (a very few) very old NAS or very old versions of linux without updated Samba server package can cause some issues with some windows based machines. It isn't a home versus pro issue, it is a Samba versus WINDOWS issues and just with very old versions of Samba.

In one thread the person makes mention of having issues connecting to a Samba share on a linux machine running Ubuntu 9.x, which was released back in 2008/9 and also shipped with an even older version of Samba. The issue is how authentication is setup by default with old versions of Samba. This has been fixed, to the best of my knowledge, in more recent versions. I encountered something similar AGES ago when setting up an Ubuntu server (circa version 9.10 I think), it took significant tinkering on the server side of things to get my Windows 7 ULTIMATE desktop to be able to connect to the share. I eventually tossed the Ubuntu server and changed it to Windows XP, just because (mostly because I had some server packages I wanted to run and they were Windows only).

Awhile back I setup an Ubuntu 12.x server for the heck of it and it worked "out of the box" to connect to the shares with my laptop running 7 home as well as my 8/8.1 machines. I haven't had connectivity issues with NAS or router attached drives.

 

[Nerre]

It isn't a home versus pro issue,

So, how come I've never had to do this on my laptop running Pro?

 

[sinshiva]

+1 to having a similar experience as azazel regarding old linux implementations. otherwise, no problems with samba via win7 home.

 

[azazel1024]

So, how come I've never had to do this on my laptop running Pro?

Have you had to do it with a win 7 home install? Misconfigured? Were the home and pro installs accessing the exact same network shares and one had a problem and the other didn't? I can tell you for a fact that the LSA control set registry value is identical between home and pro (and ultimate and Enterprise).

 

[ml70]

External hard disk is cheap and works well when the router supports it well. I have 2 pcs WD 2TB 2.5" usb drives connected to an Asus AC66 which is usb 2 only and it's a good setup for streaming 1080p movies and music up to 3-5 simultaneous clients.

The drives are formatted as ext3 !! This is an absolute necessity. The ntfs support does not work well with writes to the drive, corruption will come sooner or later but it will come.

Newer dual core routers with usb 3 should be much better for this. Get a powered usb 3 hub and add as many hdd's as need to. Naturally this is not for important data as there is no RAID. Lol it'd be possible to create a cron job to mirror disks onto each other but probably not worth the effort.

 

[stevech]

NTFS is high overhead vs. FAT.

There's a freeware windows driver to mount for read/write an ext3 or ext4 or ? other Linux format. I've used it to get data off of a USB drive I use to backup the Synology NAS' VIP files.
http://www.diskinternals.com/linux-reader/

 

[htismaqe]

NTFS is high overhead vs. FAT.

There's a freeware windows driver to mount for read/write an ext3 or ext4 or ? other Linux format. I've used it to get data off of a USB drive I use to backup the Synology NAS' VIP files.
http://www.diskinternals.com/linux-reader/

You can also use a Linux LiveCD, which I've had to do before to access an XFS-formatted drive.

The overhead on NTFS is not only high, but the format itself really isn't reliable. The reason for the overhead is that the router (or NAS, because it applies there too) is having to re-write all the FS/directory information on the fly. Not only is that slow, it also tends to produce a lot of issues.

Go to almost any router forum that supports external USB disks formatted NTFS and you'll find posts like "I can't access my drive", "my data is corrupt", and "I'm getting permissions errors trying to access my files".

 

[stevech]

Yes, all Linux/BSD based devices I've owned, Computers, NASes, USB disk to TCP/IP LAN devices, etc., ... they are are dog-slow with NTFS.

I've always assumed that the Linux/BSD community lacks the insights or will to work as efficiently with NTFS as do Microsoft OSes.

It wasn't that long ago that Linux NTFS support was read-only. I assume because of lack of open source/insights.

 

[Razor512]

It all really depends on the performance you need. I have cheap PC that I built to be a NAS, but I do not keep it on all the time. Instead I use a really cheap "NAS" device (toshiba canvio personal cloud) I used to use the WNDR4700 which performed a little better, but since when not backing up lots of data I mostly stream media. A NAS device with 37-39MB/s write and 70-75MB/s reads is more than enough for multiple HD streams.

The main thing you give up with these low powered devices, is the IO performance. The crap IPOS means that backups or anything dealing with many tiny files.

 

[azazel1024]

You are also potentially giving up flexibility, depending on what you need to run. A router is pretty much only going to work for backups (and generally only if you have the backup software running on the client, or are doing it manually), file sharing and video/audio streaming to an appropriate client.

Even a cheap NAS is likely to do that better than any router, and likely to have additional capabilities (yes, I know a very tiny number of routers also have things like iTunes servers, torrent servers and download servers. A TINY number and those routers are generally more expensive than most low end NAS).

A high end, but still very consumer NAS, is likely to have very good performance and very flexible in terms of what it can run.

Still pales compared to a full server running a "full" OS like Linux or Windows in terms of flexibility and performance, but for a lot of uses cases it can be as good or better (better could mean support, ease of deployment, lower power budget, etc.). I personally go the full, but very low power, server route because I need the extra flexibility as well as wanting the extra performance (I don't see a NAS that can do SMB3+SMB Multichannel yet, and probably never will and a 10GbE NAS is WAYYYYY more than my server).

At some point I'll probably get a cheap NAS to run as a back-up machine, because it is cheaper and less expensive in the long run to operate than building another server, and even when I "retire" most of my server components to build a newer box, it is probably more cost effective to sell off the old parts and get that cheap NAS than it is to continue to utilize them as a backup machine (though debatable, as it'll probably be in S5 most of the time, except for a few minutes every day or two to be powered up, take a backup and then power back down. I love WOL from S5 :-D).