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Comment by markovbot | Hacker News Reader

You may be lucky enough to have avoided learning about the shitshow that is consumer grade "routers". They seem to constantly be trying to come up with stupid shit they can do. Many of the "high end" of the spectrum of garbage have things like OpenVPN servers and samba shares off the included USB port.

They are all hot garbage and should not be used.

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I have no problem with a router offering a VPN server; it's another network service after all and I see a router as a device that offers network services. On the other hand, I wouldn't trust the default software stack and wouldn't use it myself personally.

However, a router acting as a file server just sounds plain wrong.

But....why. What is it about it that makes it wrong. These are really powerful devices, sometimes with dual or quad core CPUs and gigabytes of ram, so what's wrong with using them as a NAS? Especially since all I want to do is share a single USB drive on the network so I can watch some films on my TV or just run a backup from my main PC to it. Using my router as a NAS allows me to do that with very little space taken, and most importantly it's completely quiet. Dedicated NAS devices not only use considerably more power(and it does actually add up) but they are almost inevitably louder, with at least one fan and 3.5" disks.

You've already experienced it yourself. Once you find yourself in a situation that needs more than what is offered by the device you find yourself trapped. A dedicated NAS device, even a really basic one, wouldn't have the issues you have.

Also, there are small, quiet[er] NAS devices around. A bit of searching found me this: https://nascompares.com/top-5-silent-and-low-noise-nas-of-th...

>>. A dedicated NAS device, even a really basic one, wouldn't have the issues you have.

How so? What's stopping a NAS maker providing shitty support and/or firmware? I actually used to own a Netgear ReadyNAS Duo and I got rid of it mostly because of how loud it was and Netgear stopped releasing updates, which meant that things like Timemachine backup stopped working. And it was super slow for transfer speeds compared to what the drives could do.

For comparison sake, that Linksys router I have is super duper quick - it can actually do 100MB/s reads and writes on the connected drives which is very impressive(I thought) - this Samba issue is the only thing separating it from being great at it. And then I could install OpenWRT and then just install the newest version of Samba - it's just that I'm a bit lazy to do that.

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