A Dlink DIR-860L B1 is a nice device if your still able to find one...
I recently bought 3 of those at ebay (eu) for a very cheap price (one was even sealed) but you have to be make sure that they are rev B1 and not A1.
Right now I'm only using them as smart switches + Wifi AP together with my WRT3200acm but i heared they do a good job when using them as real routers with SQM aso.
In my setup they are rock solid with one of the latest Lede 17.01 Snapshots and there is even a optimized community build available with some very useful preinstalled features.
Lovely devices with decent Wifi performance. I'm very happy with these little boxes...
First of all there is no tp-link Archer C7 device. There are several very similar devices that somewhat work with LEDE - namely tp-link Archer C7 v2, tp-link Archer C7 v4 - or not. With different features and different number of antennas.
If you buy just "tp-link Archer C7" you may get hardware revision v3 or v5 that DOES NOT WORK WITH LEDE.
I own Archer C7 v4 and it is supported ONLY by development branch of lede, so you have to struggle hard because there is not web GUI for you out-of-the box.
My Archer C7 v4 is a great device.
I use it with gigabit ethernet WAN connected to Huawei optical ONT terminal.
It can pump ALMOST full bandwith of 300Mbps on WAN d/l on both IPv6 and v4 - actually closer to 260Mbps, not reaching 300Mbps.
BUT
I had to learn how to configure it using command line until it is able to connect to internet, just to download webGUI...
Owning both a C7 v2 and v4, I can confirm that with fastpath offloading you will be able to get approximately 930mbps LAN-WAN. LAN-LAN is no problem as stated in previous posts. The discussion about 9x0 mbps vs 1000 is more a theoretical problem IMHO. Until recently (before SSD became affordable) the bottle neck was always the HDD and not the ethernet wire. Add into the equation cable quality, cable length and NIC in the PC, you will not even reach the theoretical maximum. With SSD (in raid) start paying extra for 10 gigabit Ethernet NICs and switches. Then the whole discussion shifts that an C7 or even the WRT series will not even suffice.
However I am in favor (biased) for an MT7621 based router for a cheap solution. Dual core, more RAM. A quad core ARM would be next (more expensive) up to x86 based for performance. If the file transfer is important enough and/or your NAS can handle it.
I can confirm that they can be found for a very cheap price, here in EU for about 75eur.
Maybe i'll buy one as well but i wouldn't have any use for it atm, i allready bought a few DIR-860L B1's last time and a Cisco SG-300-10PP... Well my girlfriend will kill me soon enough anyway !
Even with hardware NAT from OEM firmware no one is hitting 1,000 Gbps that I've seen. Most of the benchmarks, even the rigorous ones at smallnetbuilder are hitting 850-950 Gbps (simultaneous up/down is has ranged from 1,000-1,500 Gbps though).
The expectation is that the limit of "gigabit internet" is about 940Mbits down.
I wonder if Mikrotik hAP ac^2 is supported. (it's a 700MHz quad core arm with a 2x2 2.4GHz n and 2x2 5GHz ac), based on a recent ipq chipset; costs about $70
