ASUS RT-AC3100 upgrade`

[hyzzle]

so as stated above i have the ASUS RT-ac3100 router. I just moved to a new house and upgraded the bandwidth to my new place and I am wanting to upgrade my router. I tried the Linksys AC5000 but for some reason whenever i connected to it my upload speed dropped to 0.0. I linked the way that the Linksys has the ftp and other external connection because i travel a fare amount and like to connect to my home computer and storage. Does anyone have a suggestion for a router to upgrade to? 8 ports would be great, I have a few devices on WIFI but nothing that really needs a fast connection, I do a lot of gaming and file dl's and transfers.

 

[bill001g]

So what can you possibly think to upgrade. That router already has many feature you likely are not going to be able to use. Few end device have 4 antenna to support 4x4 mimo. The mu-mimo stuff also requires the end device to support it. 1024 QAM encoding is not supported by many devices and tends to only work at very short range.

So you already have a bunch of stuff you can not use what is adding more fluff going to do.

Asus I think has vpn as part of the default firmware. If not you can always load the merlin firmware that has many more software features.

 

[hyzzle]

There's a couple features that I would like to add. First is more LAN Ports. Usually I have 2 desktops plugged in (and one of those has 2 NICs so it is taking 2 ports), a WD MyCloud (which I really do not like), and sometimes my laptop, and when that is not connected I have a 5 port PoE switch plugged in. Maybe user error but I rarely can get the switch to work correctly for any length of time, but that's for a different forum. The other part is that accessing my network externally is not a trivial task, I have still been unsuccessful in pointing my domain back into my server. The final bit is I really would like to have VLAN capabilities on the router. It also would be nice to have faster transfer speeds within my network while transferring files, which I seem to be a bit sluggish at the moment. I am looking at getting a true NAS device that I will connect because the mycloud just doesn't stay connected as a network drive. I am also going to try the asuswrt firmware and see if that will smooth out some of the minor irritation I run into.

 

[bill001g]

You are going to limit your selection of router requiring more than 4 ports. Many are commercial equipment that costs a lot and others are brands you never hear of so you get poor support.

It is pretty standard to use a switch in front of the router. Until very recently what you would find inside the router was a 5 port switch chip with one of those ports internally connected to the main router processor. So in effect you had a 1 port router with a switch but it was all internal. The most recent models have moved the switch chip into the same physical chip as the CPU but it still mostly functions as 2 units.

Because your lan ports are actually connected via a switch inside the router there should be no delay. The traffic never passes through the main cpu. Almost all switches can run all ports at 1gbit up and 1gbit down all at the same time. The network equipment should not be causing any delays for you. It is likely something else that is cause slowness.

VPN is messy to setup no matter. It is one of those things that you just have to mess with long enough to get to work. Make sure you load the merlin version of asuswrt. asuswrt has not be updated for quite some time and I think still has a security exposure. The vpn is somewhat simpler to setup than other routers but because it supports both client and server based vpn it can be confusing. Not sure what to suggest there are pretty good guides on how to set it up you just have to keep working on it.

 

[hyzzle]

When transferring files between computers what is causing the slow down is the other pcs I am transferring to/from are a bit older and not a as well equipped as my main Desktop. To be honest I really don't have any problems with speeds on my asus router so I just returned the linksys and will be keeping the ASUS. What I am looking is a NAS device. I have a WD MyCloud which I actually detest. I don't know too much about minute details of the features of a NAS device, but there's a couple things I want to be able to do. 1. I want to store all my program installers on the NAS so if a reinstall is needed I have all the program installers available. 2. gotta be able to connect to my net from outside, would be great if I could point my domain back to it but probably wishful thinking. 3. I am working on my CEH cert and I have setup a virtualized lab through hyper-V and it would be great to keep either the snap shots of the machines, or use some of the storage to be a kind of hyper-v server. Of course doing the backups and the like is a given. I have narrowed it down to these three
Netgear ReadyNAS RN422 2 Bay diskless
Netgear ReadyNAS RB212 2 Bay Diskless personal cloud nas
Synology DS218+ NAS DiskStation diskless 2 bay
there are a few buffalo NAS i looked at Diskstation, LinkStation and TeraStation
QNAP TS-251

Do have any experience or have heard about any of those NAS devices?

 

[bill001g]

I use a older computer running linux instead of a nas, it is limited by the speed of the drives. I have little personal knowledge but most people seem to buy qnap stuff. Maybe post another question asking about nas. Not sure if here or on storage....most the performance stuff is related to disk not so much the network....unless you start to try to exceed a gbit of bandwidth.