NetGear R8000 AC3200 issues

My 9_ year old Trendnet router died so I believed the hype and went as high end for the consumer as I could. TBH since my fastest device is still only N, and not AC, I can say as a wireless router it works great. I have connected what I can over to the 5GHz and left legacy over on the 2.4Ghz.

Now legacy is the printers, an HP7780 and Epson WF-7610 and one phone. I use the 5GHz and split the radios so my two computers use one and all other tablets and phones use the other. With all the off load from the 2.4 frequency the printers are much more responsive. So wirelessly there is an improvement.

The bad is the USB. I added on a Seagate 5TB USB 3.0 drive for storage and DLNA. Over N at 300 mbps I get about 13-17 MBs throughput and on LAN gbps I get 36 MBs. I could deal with the lower performance until fixed in FW but the deal killer here right now is the DLNA.

It works fine with standard Definition H.264 to my TV that is wired 100 mbps. The problem is high def where instead of 3,000 kbps bit rate we are talking 10,000 kbps bit rate. The connection chokes and I get left with intermittent "getting ready to play" messages. Even worse is after a few of these the DLNA player on the R8000 freaks out and then all video and folder info is lost to the connection. The mapped drive though still works fine. I should also say I have a couple of 13,000 mbps bit rate that under DLNA cause rapid pauses and then the crash.

I had a discussion with first level on Monday and am now waiting on second level tech. Supposedly they will get back to me today. For now though, if you are looking at that USB 3.0 connection, I would say hold off as performance is dismal at best.

 

Routers do not have the best implementation of USB 3.0
I have a Netgear R7000 that has 100% better USB than my previous Netgear R6300

I've had similar DNLA results to yours with an R7000 so I don't do it

With a Killer N1525 AC wireless card in my MSI GS60 notebook I can transfer certain types of files from notebook to desktop when in line of sight 8' from the router at up to 60MB/s
When going from the notebook to a SanDisk Extreme 64GB USB 3.0 flash drive attached to the USB 3.0 port on the R7000 the best I get is 18MB/s to 22MB/s
A new SanDisk Extreme Pro 128GB USB 3.0 flash drive yields the best file transfer results for me.

A 8.4GB MKV file of the Lone Ranger movie brings the transfer rate to it's knees at about 3MB/s
Now add wall,floors and greater distance and the file may not transfer at all.
I attach a USB 3.0 hard drive and flash drives with my video files directly to my Samsung Smart TV for best results.

Maybe USB 3.1 will be better when it's in future router but who knows just how good it will be

 

Yeah, I could do the same but then to add files or manage it I then have to move the cable over to the router or bring the computer to the USB port. My TV is on a wired 100/full mbps connection and with my laptop on a 1000/full lan connection I can get 36MBs, more than ample for 13,000 kbps bit rate. In fact is off the DLNA and use it to serve my laptop at 150 mbps (my older machine) I do not have an issue even with the networked drive feeding a movie.

Looking at my network gadget while playing the 13,000 kbps I can see where is pushes a 100 mbps connection but it is still under what is required. The LAN connection should handle it, if the DLNA would serve it up and also not crash.

Edit; I should also note, my one movie is 10,000kbps that gets chocked on. It takes my laptop at 300mbit 10.5 minutes to copy from the networked drive. Now that is 31.5 minutes even if you allow for the 100/full speed of the LAN. The movie length is 127 minutes. That means over network the speed has to be at least 4 times faster than is needed even at their reduced real world throughput.

 

I should note, I have replaced the old cat wire that was being used, 5e. I now have 3 CAT 6a patch cables. For the 100/full there is no difference. I am not too sure about the 1000/full from the PS3 nor have I yet to attach the third for bringing the computer too the router but I now know Netgear can not blame the wiring.

 

I don't really get your whole picture. But I have no problem playing 10Mbps h.264 video on my computer(wifi ac) over samba from ac66u usb 2 port .
I never liked DLNA so I am not sure how it really works out, but the issue don't seem to be the wifi or usb throughput?

10Mbps is only 1.25MB/s.

 

Agreed, the problem seems to be how the DLNA is feeding the TV. The TV is on 100/full. Now I have feed this using DLNA to the laptop on the 300mbit and there is no issue at all. The DLNA should then easily also feed the 100/full as while yes it is slower but still well within the bandwidth requirements. The other issue is the DLNA freaks out too once it starts the pausing from the problem.

Now if you feed this by USB 2.0 to the smart TV all of the h.264 plays wonderfully, even the 13mbit streams. I know that I get no where near the performance a USB 3.0 should yield but it is still well above what a video stream requires.

I can live with the NAS not being 100%, it is still more than fast enough for my needs, but I need the DLNA to work. This is being setup for my grand kids so I can just go to the TV and select the video from the DLNA and since it is a HD TV I would like to play HD video for them. I should note I had a standard def that went out too 5 mbit stream and that worked out fine.

Edit; the TV is on a wired Base100TX at 100/full.

 

A wifi N 300mbps is worse than a 100mbps ethernet 90% of the time.

Either the Smart TV aren't smart enough or the router have some crappy DLNA/USB software.

Things I would try.

If the HDD was NTFS, format it in ext3 or ext4 or try a flash drive in fat or ext format.

Try to setup a dlna server on a PC and see the TV work with higher bitrate content.

 

Issue with any FAT is it is a 5TB drive. Not too sure if the router system would like EXTx but that could be something to try. I know I can run to the laptop with DLNA without a hiccup so while I am not crazy about USB performance it seems enough to get by.

Since under USB the smart TV as a renderer has no issue I highly suspect the DLNA software. Especially since this is what crashes. A new twist is just recently it crashed by stopping the movie and then every MP4 I tried to play came back as format not supported. That is until I rebooted the R8000 and then everything worked again.

Yes it does work from the DLNA of my laptop. I should note that it can get a bit of an occasional stutter. Not too sure if this is the wireless or TV but now that I put it under a laptop HDD on the TV it is smoother but an occasional stutter as well. The TV is 4 years old now, maybe I should get another renderer that puts out HDMI.

 

Is the router on most recent firmware?

 

Yes and no, I was on the latest as purchased and on a more recent beta found by a user. It is however rumored a new one is about to be released. I just signed a NDA so can't discuss that further than that as of yet.

I just put in a 7260 over the 6250 that was in the laptop. It has is improvements. This under transferring a 12 gig media file.

1.) 300mbit before and 520mbit average connection under load (no load reads as 585 or above)
2.) Networked drive write transfer is 20MBs
3.) Networked drive read transfer is 30MBs

With the CAT6a patch chords and moving the HDD 2' from the router I get much better weird speeds. Now I see LAN throughput at 70MBs up and 40MBs down to the networked drive. So I think the upgrades have settled the HDD issues

When on top of the router, 867Mbit connection, Throughput to the networked drive was 37MBS read and 30Mbps write. as a side note with the 6250 at even 300mbit drawing from or too the networked drive used up a lot of CPU. Now with the 7260 the CPU seems to only go between 2%-4%, compared to 15-20% and that is it.

 

I just purchased a streaming BR player. I went with the Sony BDPS6200. The reason being it was on sale at the local BB and doing research it is a Dual Core. Also criteria primarily was YouTube, Netflix and Amazon Prime as this for the living room was to replace the PS3.

It now streams everything perfect over the LAN with the 100/full Mbps connection. The DLNA works great even on the 13mbit files.

 

Jus found another issue, but it is a minor one. on eboot of the router every time I was getting a IP conflict on DHCP. It turns out ReadyShare for drive or printer tends to use 192.168.1.3 and there are 2 USB ports. The router though defaults to a DHCP LAN pool from 192.168.1.2 to 192.168.1.254. I just set the lower to 192.168.1.10 and all is well again.

 

On my Netgear R7000 all the addresses were changed to 10.0.0.x numbers from 192.168. to avoid conflicts.

I have the R7000 connected to an AT&T uverse Motorola modem that has the wireless disabled by me in it's settings.

 

I think it still has to reserve, for ready share etc., the xxx.xxx.x.3 it also uses the last .0 and .1 plus it can reserve/use others. I have no issues with the 192.168 as this is a single router with no other connections or bridges etc..

Now I have 2 wired and anywhere for 5 to 10 wireless devices. I had read in a couple of places at 15 devices you are capped, I hope not.

 

I have 12 wireless devices and 0 wired.
1 x Homemade Custom desktop
3 x MSI notebooks
3 x Android Nexus smartphones
2 x Samsung Android tablets
2 x Samsung laser printers
1 x Samsung Smart TV

 

Nice I have not had them all connected but.

1 x Desktop (HO lap counter)
1 x Desktop
4 x Android phones
5 x laptops
1 x Android tablet
2 x printers
Going to go with WiFi thermostats (2 of these) soon.

Also Visitors connect to the network all the time, I have had up to 5 additional connections. I need to setup that guest network but have not had time.

My new BR player does wireless but I went with the 100mpbs wired. My TV is limited too 100mbps wired but I could go with a wireless adapter but I can keep these off the wireless network so I do. In the end though I doubt I've had more than 10 at a time connected and running on the wireless.

 

Despite my issues, I have tinkered about as much as I can for now. I decided to test out the DLNA capabilities. To my surprise it could feed out 5 independent high bit rate streams at 13000Kbit+ each to 2x android, 2x laptops and my BR player with no issue at all. I know from just one feed I was seeing 2.6MBs so 5 times that should not be an issue but running them through the two 5GHz radios plus the 100mbit LAN along with all the HDD access etc. I was real world only thinking 3 feeds at most, not 5 streams. All the wireless were 30' from the router and all 5 media files were on the 5TB drive.

 

Funny thing is, under 802.11ac the USB 2.0 is just as fast as the USB 3.0. To me this says something is definitely wrong.

 

How fast is that exactly?

 

The laptop at 30' both copy to the laptop at 32 MBs and write at 27MBs. Now if I look at the network gadget the R/W's are mostly a bit higher but do not account for average. These speeds are for a single 12.1GB file.

Now at 30' I will see 99% signal strength and the listed connected speed is 702mbps but under load I usually will see it drop to 585mbps. If under task manager I go to "Networking" under load I will see 50% load reading from the router and about 40% writing.

I was going to take some screen shots and got through the USB 3.0 then the kids and an overnighter woke up and starting using bandwidth. Tough to do all this and keep the household network active.

 

See what happens if you copy a file from the USB HDD to a computer that is connected via Ethernet wire.
It should give you better read speed but you might be limited by Wi-Fi throughput.

 

If I do over the gigabit I get much faster, still not the full speed connected to the system. I did not have the usb 2.0 connected then but under the 5TB drive I got 70+MBs copy to the laptop.

 

Finally screenshots the networked drives are; USB storage is the 3.0 drive, 5TB 3.5 5900 rpm, the T_Drive is the USB 2.0, 1TB 5400 rpm 2.5 laptop drive.