[israces]

Aside from the wireless aspect, help me choose between the Airport Extreme and the Linksys WRT350N. I don't have an -n enabled machine right now, so I'm kind of looking ahead.

I'm considering the AE due to the fact that you can plug in a USB hub for simultaneous storage and printer sharing with the rest of the network, but I hear that there are some issues with the speed of the access to the attached storage. Also, no gigabit ethernet.

As for the WRT350N, it has gigabit ethernet and the ability to share storage, but will HFS+ formatted external drives work with it, or will I have to reformat my external drives to FAT32 before they can be shared on the network? Also, will plugging in a non-gigabit device slow down the entire wired network or just that connection? (I don't know if this works the same as when a -g or -b connection joins a -n network and slows all connections down to the lower speed).

Finally, if all things were equal, would gigabit ethernet make that big of a real world difference in accessing USB2 drives attached to either of these routers, or is the bottleneck located between the drive and the router instead of the connection between the router and the computer?

Any help would be appreciated.

[krove]

Most wired switches allow mixing of device speeds, so plugging in a 100 Mb and 1000 Mb would not degrade the performance of the 1000 Mb device. The same does not go for wireless devices, however.

Apparently USB devices take a lot of CPU power, hence the slower speed of USB HDs when connected to the AE. I'm not sure if the Linksys does any better or worse. 100 Mb versus 1000 Mb ports would then have no effect on access speed to the NAS. I also doubt the Linksys would recognize HFS+, probably just FAT32 or NFS.

Unless you have two or more 1000 Mb devices that are going to wired to the router, having 1000 Mb ports doesn't make any sense given that all the wireless devices (even n) will be limited to about 100 Mb. I believe this is the reason Apple left out 1000 Mb: no one uses ethernet anymore. I got rid of it years ago when I went wireless.

While other companies make cheaper wireless equipment, Apple's solutions are always much better implemented software-wise. The setup is super easy and not as cryptic. The setup for the NAS and printer sharing features are all built into Macs. It just works.

[israces]

Sorry if I didn't mention that earlier. I am going to wire up the place with Cat5e here pretty soon because the wireless is too slow when I'm moving files around. That's why I'm concerned about the gigE issues.

I guess one solution would be to just have a wired gigE router for the wired connections and then the AE for the wireless and the storage connections, but then the file sharing from the attached drives would be limited by the AE to the 10/100 speeds and I'm kind of back to where I started.

[pilotdude]

Have you thought about getting GigE NAS with a GigE wired router for it and the computers. Buffalo has the Linkstation Live and Pro and you can also plug USB drives into them for additional storage. Since you don't have an N computer right now you could wait till you do then buy something then for the wireless part.

No GigE was a deal killer for me as I do use wired connections on most of the computers and its frustrating because as krove said Apple's software solutions are going to be much better generally.

[El Gato]

OT: What are you guys using your networks for that you would get the benefit of gigabit ethernet?

Since you don't have any n-enabled equipment yet, I would get a cheap router off of craigs list and wait until you actually have the equipment to take advantage of the technology. By that time, 802.11n routers will probably have come down in price and have more features than they do now. Just my $.02.

[israces]

Originally Posted by El Gato 

OT: What are you guys using your networks for that you would get the benefit of gigabit ethernet?

Since you don't have any n-enabled equipment yet, I would get a cheap router off of craigs list and wait until you actually have the equipment to take advantage of the technology. By that time, 802.11n routers will probably have come down in price and have more features than they do now. Just my $.02.

OT: Streaming gobs of HD pron. What else?

In reality, a 100Mb wired connection is probably fine for now, but I'm looking to future proof a little bit and all of the machines I will have on the network have gigE, so why not take advantage if possible?

The real thing that I want is super fast NAS, but I'm trying to do it on the cheap with just a new router and the exisiting external drives I already have instead of springing for something from Infrant. The fact that the routers that I'm looking at are -n wireless is just bonus at this point.

If the new AE had gigE, I'd just get it and be done (and I still might anyway), unless someone knows of a gigE wired router that lets you plug in HFS+ formatted external drives and printers all from a really easy to use control panel that works seamlessly with the Mac OS.

[jsnyder]

Originally Posted by israces 

If the new AE had gigE, I'd just get it and be done (and I still might anyway), unless someone knows of a gigE wired router that lets you plug in HFS+ formatted external drives and printers all from a really easy to use control panel that works seamlessly with the Mac OS.

Yeah, I'm wondering if ANY of the N routers out there actually deliver on speed. Since the AXn doesn't seem to be cutting it for NAS, I'd be interested in knowing what if any N routers would provide fast NAS for N, or at least fast N to gigabit so I could use it with a Buffalo Linkstation, which appears to be the only fast cheap NAS device out there.