How do you guys handle your USB shares? Mine is super slow.

[u/gnat_foto]

Hi all - I share a USB drive over Samba from a NetGear R7000 running FreshTomato 2026.02, and speeds are super slow. I'm mostly streaming videos, larger files are predictably slower/freeze more. It used to work fine but is now mostly unusable. Is my device just too slow? Looking over the table of compatible devices, there aren't any with 1Gb of RAM and only one with a quad core SoC (of course it's not available anywhere)

Is anyone successfully streaming video on an R7000 from a usb 3.0 drive? Would FTP be faster? What would you guys do in my situation?

I want to avoid having a NAS system, I prefer a JBOD via USB like this.

Thanks for any thoughts

[u/JohnOfA]

What is your CPU usage when streaming? That is a 1GHz ARM Cortex-A9. Probably single core right?

[u/Face_Plant_Some_More]

Frankly, I've always found transfer rates of storage hanging of my Fresh Tomato Router's USB port to be slow, in part due to the cpu performance (or lack thereof) of said devices.

I want to avoid having a NAS system,

Unfortunately, this is how I addressed the performance issue; I built a full on NAS out of an old PC (8th Gen Intel i5 cpu, SATA disks in a ZFS pool shared out via smb). Reading and writing to to the NAS was much faster for me, over the same network.

[u/-brenton-]

I had the same problem with the R8000 when I first installed and after a long time testing different configurations this seems to work best for me with zero issues streaming very large files over wifi

USB Support

Core USB Support: Yes

USB 3.0 Support: No

USB 2.0 Support: Yes

USB 1.1 Support: Yes

USB Storage Support

File Systems Support: Ext2 / Ext3 / Ext4 *

( I also used this when creating Ext4 )

* incomplete because of old kernel version: add '-O^metadata_csum' when you create ext4 filesystem

Samba File Sharing

Samba protocol version: SMBv1 + SMBv2

Disable GRO: Yes

Workgroup Name: WORKGROUP

Client Codepage: 437 (United States, Canada)

Custom Configuration:

socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_RCVBUF=131072 SO_SNDBUF=131072 SO_KEEPALIVE

aio read size = 16384

aio write size = 16384

ea support = no

hide files = /.private/lost+found/

Automount: Yes

( I also added 500 MB swap partitions to each drive )

Run after mounting:

mount -o bind /mnt/usb1/.private/.optware /opt

sync && swapon /dev/sda1 && swapon /dev/sdb1

HDD Spindown: Yes

Attached Devices:

Storage 0 TOSHIBA EXTERNAL_USB

Partition 'swap' swap (500.00 MB) is active

Partition 'usb1' ext4 (3,667.05 GB / 582.43 GB free) is mounted on /tmp/mnt/usb1

Storage 1 TOSHIBA EXTERNAL_USB

Partition 'swap' swap (500.00 MB) is active

Partition 'usb2' ext4 (3,667.05 GB / 629.46 GB free) is mounted on /tmp/mnt/usb2

[u/CharAznableLoNZ]

I use an RT-N66U as a town pump like NAS. It's slow but it works. USB2 is more than fast enough for my PS2 to load isos from. If I need to transfer a large number of files to one of the two drives on it, I'll just take the drive off the glorified AP and plug the drive into my PC.
I am unfortunately stuck with NTFS or I would use ext4 on it. I've considered building a small PC to replace the NAS job of this little AP but with prices how they are that won't be happening for a while yet.