Problem with external hard drive

[Chris_phorms]

Hi all,

i hope you guys can help me out here.

we use a MAC Trolley in our schoolclasses with 21 MACs and the Asus WL-500g Premium Router. All the MACs are supposed to save their data on a 1000gb external Harddrive from Western Digital, which is connected to the USB port of the router.

I got 3 main problems with that solution:

1.) I can't get proper partition names, it just says part0 and part1 (sometimes even up to part16 when i did some testing..) How can i name the Partitions?

2.) It seems like the Hard drive or the router cant handle 21 Requests of the MACs at the same time and therefore the hard drive does not appear on some MACs or MACs that can see the hard drive are not able to save stuff on it.

3.) There is also a problem with the permissions. Even though i added proper permission, its possible to save data with a guest account in a folder thats supposed to be limited to teacher access.


Any help would be gladly appreciated!

cheers
chris

[Tamadite]

As I understand, your intetion is to use the router as a file server on an environment with 21 clients. The Asus router is not intended to be used as file server. Even when this capability can be exploited it is very limited. I would recommend you to split the functionallity of your network in two: the router to route traffic and a file server to handle the files. If you have a limited budget take a look at file server solutions like qnap, netgear or dlink.

[Chris_phorms]

thx, is there no workaround?

[Tamadite]

The main problems you are to face are:

.- Very slow response time (the USB port is 2.0 but it has very limited performance due to the CPU of the router). The USB port of the router is mainly intended for low data flow demand devices like printers. When connecting mass storage devices you need a lot of patience and low data traffic demands.
.- Potential data loss or corrupted data due to the amount of the concurrent users.
.- Potential router hangs

Given your circumstances there is no workaround for the above points.

[Chris_phorms]

thank you very much!