wl500g file server

[Alphamf]

Hi All.

I've had the wl500g (non deluxe) router for quite some time but only recently discovered the capabilites with olegs firmware. After upgrading to the latest compatible firmware from oleg Ive messed around ALOT with smb and nfs. Eventually it all works, but my problem is the performance.

with smb, i could reach 1 MByte/sec at peaks and an average og 5-800 KB/s with NFS It even reaches 2 MBytes /sec at peaks but the connection acording to OS X leopard acitivity monitor is VERY spiky as in reach peak, then zero, then peak then zero all within 1 second. so the average speed is probably the same as with smb.

now since this is both the case with wired network and wireless It cant be a connection issue.

I partitioned the USB drive to EXT3 thinking that would help but with no real change. Så my questions are these:

Why is the transfer so spiky when using NFS?
why are both NFS and SMB so much slower than writing to any other network drive connected to a windows machine? Could it be the router is using USB version 1.1 ?

If I want performance file server, should I just buy a new router all together ?

[wiz]

Hi All.

If I want performance file server, should I just buy a new router all together ?

No you buy a fileserver, not a router.

And yes the 500G has only usb 1.1 and is not speedy with disks.

cheers,

Wiz

[Alphamf]

hehe ok thank you :P

but for arguements sake, what would the performance be if I bought a Wl-500w since its under 100 euros atm. Any idea? in MB/s.

I saw the dlink DIR-825 come in at around 4 MB/s with sharepoint which is about a factor 5-10 multiplication of what I have now... but cant find any numbers on the wl500w. Any clue ??

thank you for your time
AlphaMF

[wiz]

I don't know what the W version would do performance wise with disks. But I can imagine it won't be impressive as of throughput from and to the disk either.

cheers,

Wiz

[MMCM]

If you want a file server with good performance don't mess around with soho routers. Build a system yourself based on at least a mini-ITX board with a (dual core?) atom processor, GBit LAN and SATA onboard running your favourite linux distro.

[Alphamf]

Thanks a lot to both of you, Wiz and MMCM.

I was actually just considering that. For around 150 euros One could make a pretty descent configuration based on the Intel atom built-in mobo / cpu configuration with 1.6 gHz. Its not much, but for a file server I recon it should be suitable while keeping the energy consumption low. Dont really have a favorite linux distro since I don't have that much experience with it, but after working in terminal for a while and messing around with the wl-500g so much I guess getting an ubuntu working shouldn't be more than a weekends work

Ill definitely be looking more into it in the near future. Thank you for confirming the logic behind my idea though

AlphaMF