I have a Seagate drive that is connected to a lower end Mac Mini which is on 24/7. The drive is using the original NTFS format. My Mac is using a third party NTFS driver. I am a Windows & Mac user and don't have any dedicated Linux machines. My main use of the drive, beyond backups, is to serve media to my desktops and mobile devices. This is with simple file sharing, FTP, Plex, and XBMC.

I would like to see if I could retire the Mac Mini from 24/7 duty and host the drive on my OpenWrt router. My TP-LINK TL-3600 has two USB 2 ports. Is OpenWrt capable of hosting a Seagate 3 TB drive as a Samba network drive, FTP server, and DLNA server? The format will remain NTFS.

If above is NOT feasible or reliable, I can always revert back to my current setup on the Mac Mini. The notion of hosting the drive from the router is intriguing, because of reduced energy usage.

Steve

TP-LINK TL-WDR3600
OpenWrt Attitude Adjustment 12.09 / LuCI 0.11.1 Release (0.11.1)

I have 1TB drive connected to a wr1043nd router with samba and I have r/w speeds 8-10MB/s with ext4 filesystem on it, I'm using it a year or so nonstop and it is almost perfect. I don't know hows about NTFS performance, but I'd reformat to native linux FS. Your router is more powerful than mine, you might expect higher speed, but I don't think you will get full 30MB/s what can USB2.0 supply. If you don't mind slower speed, openwrt has all the features you are talking about.

(Last edited by nozombian on 10 Jan 2014, 21:58)

There might be a performance drop when you connect USB storage to the router.

Max. USB2 speed is ~40MB/s.
With encrypted connections (SSH/SFTP or FTPS) i only get 2-3MB/s from a connected USB harddisk on my WDR3600.
Writing on the USB2 disk from the router is between 20MB/s (only zeroes from /dev/zero) to 1MB/s (random data from router)
The router is running openvpn + some minor stuff in the background.
I cannot try DLNA on it, because i dont have enough space left on the flash of my device (but if you only have DLNA, FTP, Samba you should be fine)

I dont know the power state of a Mac Mini but current PC Hardware can get down to ~5W Idle
see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJWG8O6Pnmk (without Display, LAN, USB devices) or 10W ("normal" idle)

You could setup Wake on LAN (WOL) with OpenWrt

Edit: My "low" performance might be because OpenVPN is running ... someone should write some wiki pages similar to the OpenSSL benchmark ones
Edit2: oh http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/hardware/performance found

(Last edited by zloop on 10 Jan 2014, 22:19)

I believe this has something to do with how the Linux kernel was configured. If the OpenWRT you installed on your router wasn't configured with a Support for large (2TB+) block devices and files, then there is a chance it will also see 2TB.

I had a build dir of a normal x86 vdi image and .config of the 3.10.24 kernel had

CONFIG_LBDAF=y

so it should support >2TB  (see https://www.kernel.org/doc/menuconfig/b … onfig.html )

I thought that this router is better, I have the the same speed with slower cpu. The limit is probably in some other component. But 1MB/s random is damn slow, you should get close to 5MB/s:

root@wr1043nd:/mnt/usb/test# time dd if=/dev/zero of=test.bin bs=1M count=100
100+0 records in
100+0 records out
real    0m 4.82s
user    0m 0.00s
sys     0m 1.49s
root@wr1043nd:/mnt/usb/test# time dd if=/dev/urandom of=test.bin bs=1M count=100
100+0 records in
100+0 records out
real    2m 21.00s
user    0m 0.00s
sys     2m 17.84s

Edit: I looked into http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/hardware/performance It is nice article, but iperf probably sucks, I get 230MB/s download and 220MB/s upload with wr1043nd on speedtest (bridged), but that is probably the max speed of my line (or mikrotik media converter before my router, which does NAT), iperf shows 100MB/s according to the article.

I tried to test also wifi speed of wr841n with my notebook and with iperf I got close 60MB/s, on speedtest I got 80MB/s.

(Last edited by nozombian on 10 Jan 2014, 22:56)

I'm beginning to think it's best not to put a heavily used external drive on the router itself.

I'm noticing issues with the drive being accessed through my Mac Mini from a Windows PC. I'm using imaging software called Macrium Reflect, which creates a mountable image of one of my Windows partitions. After mounting image over the network, I kept getting errors saying the image was corrupted. So I moved the image to another USB drive and hooked it directly to the PC and mounted it locally. The errors went away. The image file is nearly 300 GB, so it's obvious that mounting over a network is not trivial.

These problems occurred when using the Mac Mini to host the USB drive as a network share. I can only imagine what it would be like if I accessed it through the router.

I found it interesting product called an NAS adapter.

http://www.addonics.com/category/nas_adapter.php

It looks like it could be the solution I've been looking for. It converts any USB drive to a network drive through an ethernet connection. It should take the processing load off of my underpowered Mac Mini. I may check it out sometime soon.

Also somebody commented on the power of PCs in standby mode. My Mac Mini in question is rated by Apple at 10 watts in idle mode.

Steve

My recommendation would be to pick up a Pogoplug ($15) and install Arch Linux ARM.

http://blog.qnology.com/2013/03/tutoria … linux.html

It will perform better than most if not all OpenWRT routers (which is typically CPU bound).

Or get this used Seagate GoFLEX NET $9.99 + $9.99 S/H. It has two SATA ports.

Actually I have this drive:

http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Backup-De … ackup+plus

It is a 3  tb desktop Seagate and not the slim models that fit in the device in your eBay link. I already come across that solution and realized that I can't use it.

Perhaps, if you take the drive out of its casing, you should be able to dock it into one of its two SATA ports.