@hdtodd 

I am not sure you would see much difference in performace by changing the filesystem unless you were using an extremely dated format.  Since almost all routers use linux based kernels, if you wanted to do some benchmarking, I would start by formatting your drive in EXT4 filesystem as it is generally considered the native filesystem in Linux.  I would recommend starting with a thumbdrive to avoid headaches with and constant formatting of your 4TB drive.

Hope this helps.

  @pcuttle 

pcuttle wrote

  @hdtodd 

 I would start by formatting your drive in EXT4 filesystem as it is generally considered the native filesystem in Linux. 

 .

I would have thought so, too, but the manual says: "If you use a USB hard drive, make sure its file system is FAT32, exFat, NTFS or HFS+."  I won't be using FAT32. I'd be interested to know if the router will recognize ext{2,3,4}.  Perhaps the manual's recommendation is because the writers assumed users would only have access to Win or Macs, with no ability to partition an ext format.

But I think I'll try your idea with a thumbdrive with different partition formats to see if there's a substantial difference.  I think this may not be the best router for this purpose, but with a little tinkering it may serve well enough to keep.

If I do the analysis, I'l post back the results here.

David

  @hdtodd 

Ultimately, filesystem support is going to be dependant on how the kernel is built.  Devs may have tried to provide support only for the more common filesystems that have the most cross compatability to mainstream OSs.  I would be interested to see what you find since I am not really sure you will notice much diffrence.  The other consideration is if you need the USB drive to maintain compatability as a USB drive to MacOS as HFS+ is your best bet if you need the drive to be portable.

  @hdtodd 

AX1800 Router Storage Performance Testing 2022-07-28

Comparison of write performance with various formats for the attached drive

Base system and methodology:

* Mac Mini: 2018 model; 8GB memory; 256GB SSD storage, 1Gb ethernet connection to router
* OSX Catalina 10.15.7
* Archer AX1800, hardware v 1.20, firmware 1.3.5 Build 20211231 rel.64080(5553); USB 2.0 interface
* Lexar 32GB µSD in a Lexar USB adapter dongle as router storage
* NTFS and ext partitions formatted on Raspberry Pi with RaspOS 5.15.32-v8+ #1538, fdisk, and mkfs
* exFAT and HFS+ partitions formatted on Mac OS X 10.15.7
* Files are random numbers generated with
* Transfer 10 files of random numbers, 0.512GB each file, for a total of 5.12GB=5,120,000,000B
* Transfer from Mac to AX1800 µSD-USB2-attached storage via 1Gb Ethernet
* Copy command on Mac, after mounting the router drive:
* Router load for Internet traffic was modest during testing times

  @hdtodd 

Huh.  The system thought that the file generation command and copy commands were links.  Can't see how to get them into a message.

Well, the generation involved dd and the copy was just a cp from OSX to the router drive over the net.

  @hdtodd 

So, the AX1800 doesn't recognize ext{2,3,4} drives.

NTFS and HFS+ have comparable performance and are substantially faster than exFAT (50% faster).

One anomaly is the first HFS+ reading.  I suspect that the first writes to that drive require time to build a directory structure, and once that's done, performance is consistent.  I'll keep my production Time Machine drive in HFS+ format.  It's at least comparable to NTFS and may be slightly faster.

I've seen reviews of more modern routers from other manufacturers where the write performance was about 110MB/sec -- about 3.5 times faster than this.  Those tests used an SSD as the target drive and probably had USB3 interfaces.  The AX1800 probably suffers from USB2 rather than USB3 interface.  At 30MB/sec = 240Mb/sec, the router is driving that interface at about 50% of its capacity, and that's asking a lot.  My µSD is rated at 100MB/sec, so I don't think it was the limiting factor.

I'll stay with this AX1800 for now but once I've made some other changes in our tools, I'll go looking at those other routers.  Router-based backup is something I've long wanted to be able to do, and it looks like it's possible now.  This 30MB/sec will do for now, but I'll want something faster in the longer term.

And, of course, none of this measures the performance for Time Machine.  But this was a simple experiment to set up, and I think it was informative.

  @hdtodd 

Great work!  If you want to really build out a robust NAS, consider looking into a TureNAS or similar open NAS solution.  TrueNAS can handle any filesystem you throw at it and supports a variety of advanced strorage configurations.  Too bad the cost of a Raspberry Pi has gone through the roof as they are(were) a popular platform for setting up an inexpensive open source NAS soultion.  I should mention though, as far as I know, TrueNAS cannot run on an RPI, but there is plenty of info online on other options, even YouTube videos.  Otherwise, even a PC lying around could be repurposed for the task. Good luck.

  @hdtodd 

Well, it was only a temporary win.

I find that I'm able to mount the drive now on my Mac, but I'm not able to write to the router drive any more.

I reformatted and started again, but I got the same result. 

For both TimeMachine (from my Mac running Catalina) and SMB mount/tar (from my wife's running Mojave), I'm able to create initial files, but the next day, I can mount the drive but can't write to it.  So the initial backup works, but daily incrementals fail.  "permission denied" when I try to write to it.

Pretty much convinced now to move on to a different brand of router.  I can best most technical problems like this, but this one isn't worth much more of my time.  Seems to be an issue deep in the router's NAS software and the way it authenticates, and that software isn't very transparent.  I can't seem to get it to work correctly from either OSX or RaspiOS Linux.

But if you've seen this and know the solution, I'd be happy to give it a try.