Inexpensive Gigabit USB NAS?
#1
I've been using the USB NAS feature of my Netgear router for serving files to various XBMC clients around the house for about 2 years now. This has been mainly to eliminate any always-on PCs. It's been serviceable, but sometimes causes buffering on 1080p files. It seems the USB controller in the router creates a bottleneck around 2-4 MB/s and it can sometime drop to as low as 500 KB/s. Transfers from PC-to-PC do not seem to be affected by the same bottleneck, even when using the same USB HDD connected to a PC instead of directly to the router, so I've narrowed the bottleneck to the USB NAS feature of the router.

Can anyone suggest a stand-alone Gigabit USB NAS device that I can use to replace the USB NAS feature of my router? There seem to be several in the $50 range and a few below, but none seem to be from a brand I'm readily familiar with... I really just don't know which to avoid? I was about to pull the trigger on one of the PogoPlug devices, but from the reviews I've read they lack SAMBA and UPNP is slow... they seem to really be a cloud-access device more than a NAS device for the local network.

My USB HDD is formatted as NTFS and my wireless router has a Gigabit wired switch. I'd like a device that can support 2-4 USB drives, but a single-drive device would be fine if it offers solid reliability without breaking the bank. A built-in torrent client would be nice as well, but isn't a must.

I'm not really looking to setup an UNRAID server or any other type of home server at the moment... I'm really looking to eliminate PCs and not add more.

Any advice is appreciated. Thanks!
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#2
Before buying anything new, you might want to try formatting the drive as Ext(2/3/4) if the router supports it. The router will be running some form of embedded linux kernel, and NTFS linux drivers are very CPU intensive (they can bring my core2quad to its knees at times), probably more than your routers tiny cpu can handle. You may not have that issue if you use a linux native format like Ext.
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#3
I have a spare drive that I'll try formatting EXT2 to see if that helps. Thanks for the tip!
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Inexpensive Gigabit USB NAS?0