Sharing External Hard Drive Over LAN

I'm looking to hook up an 8TB USB 3.0 external WD drive to my home network to store large files and make them accessible 24/7 over the LAN.

Would it be better to hook it directly into the USB 3.0 port on my TP-Link Archer AX55 router, or to hook it into an old laptop I have, and share the drive over the network (either via Gigabit Ethernet or WiFi 6)?

Plugging the hard drive directly into the router seems simpler, but I'm wondering if it's better to have an intermediate computer to keep the load off the router's processor? Any laptop from the last 10 years would surely have a more powerful CPU than a router, right? I have an old HP EliteBook 2570p & EliteBook 2530p (each upgraded with USB 3.0 & WiFi 6) that could be placed right next to the router.

 

I think you're over thinking things here. IO for a HDD / SATA isn't very much when it comes to processing. Just plug it into the router.

The only advantage of reusing an old laptop would be able to RDP into the laptop if you wanted to do something with the drive. Most HDD's only push about 100-150MB/s which fits the 1gbps speed. USB 3 will provide up to 5gbps so the network would be the only bottleneck you would observe.

If you were running multiple drives in an enclosure w/ Raid configured then it might make more sense to bypass the USB connection and use Ethernet instead with an upgraded setup using 5 / 10 gbps ethernet.

I run a "server" for a variety of things in my home and a NAS is one purpose I built it for. I'm running Raid 10 which uses 4 drives and throughput is 400MB/s+ and uses the 5gbps NIC to achieve those speeds over the network. Mind you to get those I have to be wired with Ethernet using a USB-C 5gbps adapter.

 

@wiivile I agree that most routers won't do very good with USB drive especially if formatted with NTFS.
Storage performance doesn't seem to be reliably tested anymore but at the time it was the only router that a good job was a Linksys WRT3200acm and that's because it has a CPU from a NAS to begin with (Marvell Armada 385).

Most other router's would do reasonably well with reading but rather bad with writing - even ones as good as Netgear R7800. See here for comparison. I can't say exactly how good your router would e especially that v1 and v2 use completely different processors but I wouldn't be surprised if write speeds weren't particularly good.

 

What would be the bottleneck of a 5400rpm or 7200rpm drive connected to a computer over USB 3.0, hooked up via 1) Gigabit Ethernet or 2) WiFi 6? I know WiFi 6 can get faster than Gigabit Ethernet, but can vary based on many variables.

And if the USB 3.0 drive is connected directly to the router, would the router's weak CPU ever be the bottleneck?

 

@wiivile

The HDD is not going to be able to exceed 1gbps inmost cases.

1gbps Ethernet vs 802.11ax is about the same unless you have a 2.5gbps port on the AP i.e. my setup with NWA210AX <> 5gbps port <> Raid 10 @ 400MB/s Then the bottleneck is the WIFI @ 1.5gbps

The WRITE performance over a USB port based on the ROUTER you're using might be the bottleneck due to the CPU being used.

To keep things simple for ease of use though just plug into the router and be able to stream from the HDD decomplicates things to troubleshoot if something goes not so right. The boost from a spare laptop would only really be needed if you're planning to do something intensive on the HDD through the router. If you want something that's a bit more beefier then go with a DAS that can house multiple HDD's in it and provide more horsepower for R/W activities.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Y4F5SCK/ -- $280 / 5 drives
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08DLTKXCP/ --$290 / 5 drives

If you only need a couple of drive bays for say Raid 1 mirroring then it's cheaper.
https://www.amazon.com/HornetTek-Gemini-Type-Dual-Enclosure/dp/B01HHHGP4I/ -- $65 / 2-drives
https://www.amazon.com/Mediasonic-ProRaid-10Gbps-Drive-Enclosure/dp/B077H9Z7TS/ -- $80 / 2-drives
https://www.amazon.com/ORICO-Bay-Hard-Drive-Enclosure/dp/B0734CZSXL/ -- $80 / 2-drives

Going with these enclosures offers more flexibility in the drive size / capacity as well. If you wanted to go extreme and put 20TB drives in them you could. It all depends on how much you want to spend on a setup and how well you want it to perform.

HDD's typically only hit 100-200mbps though over SATA
SSD's can hit up to 550mbps SATA
NVME's top out these days with Gen 4 speeds in the 7500mbps R / 5000mbps W

 

Wait, can't most 5400-7200rpm HDD's hit 100-200 megabytes/sec? Isn't that more than Gigabit ethernet can handle?

 

Discussing the speed of the HDD or SSD is entirely pointless as router's CPU will impose a severe limit on performance.

 

If you look at the table comparing gbps / MBps you can see that 1gbps give you 125 MB/s and so on. For my 400 MB/s I need a 5gbps adapter on each end to get the full throughput from the drives.

10gbps would be sufficient for a low end NVME drive but, a USB 3.2 2x2 (20gbps) would be a better option to get closer to the top end 3.5GB/s of Gen 3 drives. though you would still have an additional ~1GB/s leftover in bandwidth.




So, USB 3 @ 5gbps / 625MB/s = SATA 3 top speed
USB 3.2 @ 10gbps / 1250MB/s = twice the speeds of SATA 3
USBB3.2 2x2 @ 20gbps = SATA 3 x 4
USB4 / TB4 = SATA 3 x 8

Short lengths of Ethernet Cat5+ / 6 / 7/ 8 can go beyond 10gbps easily even if not in spec with length / shielding requirements. NBAS-T ( 2.5gbps / 5gbps) speeds over Ethernet allow for incremental speed boosts over longer lengths of lesser CAT cables so you don't have to re-pull new cabling as you would need to with a jump from 1gbps to 10gbps.

Yes, the CPU whether router or NAS can blow chunks when doing more than moving packets. When trying to stream from a NAS if it's not direct playback and it needs to transcode the file it will choke and buffer like crazy. The hype surrounding NAS x/y/z being able to do so is kind of a joke for marketing to sell more units. If you don't have a HW decoder in place the CPU's they use are woefully inadequate to handle anything. If you're willing to spend $1000 on drives you should just build your own NAS instead of picking something off the shelf.

IMO using the router USB to stream from a disk shouldn't be much of an issue as long as you're processing the video file somewhere else as the router will crash if you're trying to do anything more. Using the router as a backup location should be fine if you're not expecting top speeds between the drive / client.
There are always caveats when moving data on the network. putting / pulling usually is the easiest.