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The Intel® Centrino® Advanced-N 6205 dual-band 2x2 adapter delivers up to 300 Mbps bandwidth.
--That is your wireless adapter. It supports 2.4G 300Mbps and 5GHz 300Mbps, 802.11n standard only.

Simultaneous 2.4GHz 300Mbps and 5GHz 433Mbps connections for 733Mbps of total available bandwidth
--That is the C2 router. It supports 2.4G 300Mbps and 5GHz 150Mbps for 802.11n standard. 5GHz 433Mbps for 802.11ac standard.

Background Knowledge: a wireless connection of 300Mbps can provide a data transmission rate of 100~150Mbps in actual application such as file transferring. Why? Because if we want to transmit 1000bits message via Wi-Fi, the device has to spend about 2000bits to package the message. The extra 1000bits overhead are the expensive it cost.
The procedure is like delivering some eggs by express, the eggs are 500 grams in weight, but we need to using a 500 gram box to package them for safety. Check this article

Now here is the answer for the questions:

Answer 1: From the above you can see both the C2 and you router support 300Mbps in 2.4GHz, so you got a 300Mbps Wi-Fi connection, and the corresponding download speed is about 150Mbps. That's perfectly normal. As to the 5Ghz Wi-Fi, mind that the C2 supports only 5GHz 150Mbps for 802.11n standard, and your adapter is 802.11n only, so that's why you get 150Mbps connection in 5GHz and 110Mbps corresponding download rate, That's also normal.:cool:

TP-LINK's T2U and T4U are 802.11ac Wi-Fi adatpers.

Answer 2: Two channel means the C2 provides both 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi concurrently, you use 5GHz and your wife uses 2.4GHz at the same time without interfering each other. So what cause the YouTube blocked? It blocked because the bittorrent eat up all the available Internet throughput, your wife's WiFi is still working but she got no Internet outbound throughput.

bandwidth allocation: I never expect too much from this function. I try a lot third-party firmware and routers of other brands, none of them have a perfect bandwidth control mechanism. Nothing surprise, I am used to it.

Answer 3: As to this problem, it is not a problem..I think that is the best performance your HDD is providing. The HD170R reads the HDD and then transfers the data to the router, then the router forward the data to your laptop via wireless. What you see should be 5 MBytes = 40Mbitps, remember the analogy above, 40Mbitps data rate corresponds to about 80Mbitps Wi-FI speed. That's not low at all. The true bottleneck is the mediaplayer or the router need to read the HDD first. The reading speed is limited because they are embedded devices.

Answer 4: connect the HDD to the C2 router, enable storage sharing function. In this way the C2 acts as a samba server, and you can access the HDD via \\192.168.0.1. Then you can open bittorrent and try download a file directly to the network-drive \\192.168.0.1\
Notice: I 100% believe this would hurt the router and the HDD....I would prefer download the file to my laptop first and then upload it to the HDD...

Thank you very much!

I have a problem.

I connect a hdd to the router. The Sony Bravia KDL26EX320 my television only see the audio files via router Media Server, and play. The image and video files can not see. The pictures and videos on the tv plays, when the HDD is attached to my tv.
(otherwise ftp, samba server works perfectly :) )

* Please improve the next firmware.

Hi totya979

Media sharing is defined by DLNA standard, which provides easy network sharing for specific media file formats.
TP-LINK's routers is yet not perfectly compatible with DLNA standard, so in some cases some formats may not be shown on your DLNA device (your TV).

I think newer routers like Archer series (11ac series) will get firmware update in the future.