was both the laptop and NAS on wifi or the NAS was wired?
I didn't know you could get NAS models with wireless. It was wired. The laptop was on wifi.
I've since switched to dd-wrt on my router (Netgear R7000) and dd-wrt on my WAP (Netgear R6400v2), and I get 50MB/s read and write from my laptop, and even faster using my mobile (Pocophone F1), so I'm happy.
Thank you for sharing your final verdict.
Given its WAF, had you told me that the GL-B1300 shows a decent WiFi performance, I would have paid the higher price due to its four CPU cores and large memory, and given it additional tasks.
But I'll buy another Archer C7 v5 which is a very good managed VLAN AP + switch in my view. The EA6350 and RT-AC58U don't have the right profile for my use case (less WiFi, more CPU).
EA6350v3 and rt-ac58u have significantly better wifi than the c7 (but the rt-ac58u should be avoided due to its RAM shortage, for the EA6350v3 it's elementary to get the v3 h/w revision) - for about the same amount of money as the c7.
Could you define "significantly better" for me? Are you referring to beamforming, MU-MIMO, and not the bandwidth?
What is your opinion on the WiFi range of these devices, not considering beamforming?
Btw, the C7 is cheaper at my end, but YMMV of course.
Have you tested and compared all three devices? In my experience, comparing specs and determining what should be better doesn't necessarily equate to what is better.
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I can confirm that the EA8300 (IPQ4019) has noticeably better performance at moderate or weak levels than does an Archer C7v2, both in typical AP and 802.11s operation.
No, I own neither of them - but I do own a BT Home Hub 5 Type A (same 5 GHz radio as the Archer c7) and two ipq4019 devices, the newer QCA wlan cards are better (wave2) and more stable/ reliable.
Judging from the techdata pages, the Archer C7v2 has QCA9558 / QCA9880-BR4A WiFi chips, while v5 has QCA9563 / QCA9880 chips, so my first Q would be whether @slh has compared against a C7 v5 or not?
And the EA6350 has an IPQ4018, not an IPQ4019 as the EA8300. Plus the EA8300 is AC2200, while the EA6350 is AC1300 (or AC1200+), and the C7 is AC1750...
Still, the recommended EA6350 v3 is based on the IPQ4018, an AC1200 2x2 MU-MIMO, and that's a bit different from an EA8300 with AC2200 and (I guess) 4x4 MU-MIMO, no?
The wlan for ipq4018 and ipq4019 is very similar, the ipq4019 SOC mostly just offers an additional PCIe bus for adding a third (QCA9984) radio (usually used as dedicated 4x4 uplink/ backhaul).
- https://www.qualcomm.com/products/ipq4018
- https://www.qualcomm.com/products/ipq4019
- https://www.qualcomm.com/products/qca9980
Archer c7 v2 up to the v5 and the BT Home Hub 5 Type A all use the same QCA9880-BR4A 5 GHz 802.11ac wlan card, only the 2.4 GHz wlan differs slightly (but it's still comparable).
If you're looking for 4x4 802.11ac/ wave2 wlan, there'd always be ipq8065 (e.g. Netgear Nighthawk x4s/ r7800 or ZyXEL Armor Z2/ nbg6817) - but that's in a slightly different price category:
These test results from 2013 seem to support the point that the C7 (v2?) at 5 GHz does not perform very well over distance. The TRENDnet TEW-811DRU in the comparison is a 2x2 MIMO device that interestingly performs better over distance (note: Broadcom). At 2.4 GHz the C7 looks is not as bad, though.
It's a shame I cant run my old RT-AC66U with OpenWRT; it's such a great AP.
I've read somewhere that the EA6350 used to have a single core CPU; today's v3 with the 2x2 MU-MIMO outperforming the C7 and its quad-core CPU it looks like a solid solution at a fair price. Thanks @slh and @jeff
The 4x4 3x3 are only relevant if you use stock FW, Archer C7 cant push fast enough to saturate even a 2x2 client (with openwrt). With stock yes..
So in the context of OpenWrt, any wave2, ARM based device (ipq40xx) is a better buy than the c7.
The trouble is, there's so few of them around that are supported by OpenWrt. In Australia, there's only the 6350v3, which is hardly available, the RT-AC58U which doesn't haven't enough RAM, and the B1300 which has poor wireless. Zyxels aren't available here. If you move to the WRT series, the wireless is poor, and the R7800 isn't available here either.
Yes it's true, one should know what one's buying. Yet I think the verdicts in your comment may be based on assumptions. Regarding the Archer C7:
- We're discussing the use of a C7 as an access point, so the lack of optimised NAT (LAN ↔WAN) which limits uplink traffic to 250 Mbit/s or so is not an issue (and it also seems that's going to be fixed by OpenWRT 19.01).
- WLAN ↔ LAN throughput under OpenWRT is also worse with OpenWRT than with stock firmware, it peaks around 450 Mbit/s vs. 750 Mbit/s. How relevant this is depends on the use case.
- (I'm referring to TP-Link Archer C5 AC1200 / TP-Link Archer C7 AC1750 / TP-Link TL-WDR7500, and there are several discussion threads in this regard.)
- It was said that the prices for the RT-AC58U, EA6350 v3 and C7 v5 are identical, which is not the case everywhere on the globe.
Regarding WiFi:
- It's not always the case that one can use WiFI channels exclusively.
- When you're not the only one operating WiFi APs, and / or due to regulatory aspects (which are country specific), the number of available 80 MHz channels may be limited (e.g. when you operate several APs which need to use different channels), so "AC1200" (867@5GHz, such as the EA6350) would @40MHz be limited to 400 Mbit/s while "AC1750" (1300@5GHz) can still provide 600 Mbit/s (to clients which support it, but of course that applies to all scenarios).
- When sharing WiFi channels with neighbours, it's not so bad to have nominal high rates for using the time slots you have although your throughput will never be as high.
- High bitrates at larger distance were not the original focus in this discussion thread. Rather, it was about several APs covering an area which, WiFi-wise, is separated into three sections.
And: I definitely believe that an EA56350 v3 with a quad core CPU is capable of higher throughput than the single core Archer C7 v5. But when exactly will that even be necessary? Its nominal 867 Mbit/s at 5 GHz will boil down to a maximum of 477 Mbit/s net traffic anyway.
So I suggest we agree on good old "YMMV"... 
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You could buy Netgear XR500, basically same hardware, only more flash.
There were some posts like Support for Netgear XR500 but there is no official support. It's so similar to R7800 that even OFW is interchngable (written in linked post).
If You are brave enough 
You could try add this device.
Its actually simpler than that, ipq40xx is a better buy because ath10k needs a fast CPU to push any serious traffic, even a R7800 cant saturate the QCA9984 (4x4 wave2).
Its evident when you see the performance jump once you set the CPU freq governor to performance (for ARM cpus), as opposed to the default ondemand.
With ipq4028 I consistently get 500mbps++ with governor set to performance. C7v2 would never break 360mbps in my case (wifi to lan, no nat involved).
So its not about fastpath/hwnat or any of that, unless OpenWrt is able to offload Wifi like QCA intended with these designs, faster CPU is always a better buy with any ath10k device.
I definitely appreciate the information you provide, but I find it difficult to understand what your bottom line really is.
If you see a "performance jump" on quad core arm processors when changing the CPU governor to "performace" (max CPU frequency all the time) then it sounds like performance is significantly lower without this measure. And you achieve 500 Mbit/s if you change that setting, so I guess it's also 350 without tweaking the system? So that means there's no impressive performance of ipq4028 devices out of the box?
And I'm not so sure I'd draw the same conclusion ("speed") from that as you, because the Linux scheduler can be a bit special when it comes to assigning tasks to cores, cache misses are expensive, and CPU frequency change is also not for free. It may well be that the "jump" takes place due to lower administrative overhead in combination with latency aspects.
But yes, speed in general is certainly not such a bad thing, and if we compare C7 v5 with QCA9563 (385.84 BogoMIPS) against C7 v2 with QCA9558 (358.80 BogoMIPS) then I wouldn't call that a "jump".
I'm simply sharing my observation. With OpenWrt you have to take main CPU into consideration. R7800 on stock FW can push > 800mbps over WiFi, because its offloaded to special cores (NSS). With OpenWrt, WiFi is handled by the main ARM cores, you get much slower speeds, but, with governor set to performance, you can expect at least 600-700mbps from reports I see here.
As for my device, default config gets me around 400mbps. If you do repeated tests continuously you would see increased performance 430-440mbps (since CPU would be running at a higher clock).
Manually setting governor to performance gets consistent speeds over 500mbps. This is not a "tweak", rather the default settings are simply too restrictive. A tweak or a hack is flashing custom uboots or overclocking. See this post: 160MHz on Netgear R7800
Again, my whole point was: When one looks at C7vX vs IPQ40xx, they would think: 3:3 vs 2:2, "oh the C7 must be better!", but with OpenWrt the 3:3 will make no difference, because the main CPU can't even saturate a 2:2 link, while ipq40xx can, end result? ipq40xx is faster (and being multicore you have room to do other things while ath10k is maxing one of your 4 cores). The 720Mhz MIPS is just not comparable to the newer ARM SoCs, nothing subjective there.
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Sir yes Sir.
I understand you found my YMMV comment not simple enough but still, in a noisy WiFi environment where no device will achieve max WiFi throughput, higher achievable data rate in the available time slots is an advantage which the C7 can make use of, and the same applies to scenarios where you can use 3x3 with a 40 MHz channel.
As for the actual data rate of the C7 v5, for which one can find pretty different figures, it's about time I make my own test.