D-Link Forums
The Graveyard - Products No Longer Supported => Routers / COVR => DIR-655 => Topic started by: robert_rcr on September 16, 2007, 07:40:13 PM
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My question is, Why is there no support for USB external drives? I know the hardware is not the problem. I love this router but it would be nice if I could plug in an external drive and be able to access files on a network. So my next question is, I'm I going to be able to do this on a later firmware?
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I'm using a wired/wireless network attached storage server (NAS) that's working fine with mine. I've assigned it a Fixed IP and everything is great.
It has 2 USB ports but I've attached a cheap radioshack 4 port hub to one port and I can see/access all 3 drives currently attached. Have you considered that option?
One thing I have had issues with the NAS is the wireless aspect. It's never had a consistent connection and the NAS drives, which I use to back up my main drives, would never get the job done. Now I've just hardwired it into the router and it too is hunky dory.
DNAtsol
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No but I will keep that in mind I also wanted to set up an FTP server so I can listen to my music at work but I'm not so sure how that will work but thank you for the reply
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It is not uncommon for a NAS device to have a built in FTP server (I know the D-Link DNS-323 does). If you had a network attached NAS that does support FTP, you would need to merely forward the FTP port (default 21) to that private IP.
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That's right. Mine does have a built in FTP server. I just haven't bothered to set it up yet. have a look at a DNS-120
www.dlink.com/products/?sec=1&pid=352 (http://www.dlink.com/products/?sec=1&pid=352)
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I'm using a wired/wireless network attached storage server (NAS) that's working fine with mine. I've assigned it a Fixed IP and everything is great.
It has 2 USB ports but I've attached a cheap radioshack 4 port hub to one port and I can see/access all 3 drives currently attached. Have you considered that option?
One thing I have had issues with the NAS is the wireless aspect. It's never had a consistent connection and the NAS drives, which I use to back up my main drives, would never get the job done. Now I've just hardwired it into the router and it too is hunky dory.
DNAtsol
I'm kind of new at this, so I'm kind of confused... Does this mean that the DIR-655 does support external hard drives plugged in through the USB port?
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No, this was a discussion on using external NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices on a network run by a DIR-655 as an alternative to being able to attach drives directly to the DIR-655.
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No but I will keep that in mind I also wanted to set up an FTP server so I can listen to my music at work but I'm not so sure how that will work but thank you for the reply
Why would you use a FTP server to listen to music?!
Use a streaming server like Windows Media Encoder.
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So what good is the USB port on the back of the DIR-655 if not for USB action?? is it only for Windows Connect Now setup?
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Yes, it is only for Windows Connect Now.
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I have heard that there are some plans to eventually enable the USB port to allow it to be used as a full fledged USB port similarly to how the Apple wireless N router is used so that an external USB HDD can be plugged in and shared over the network. Is there any timeframe on when this might become available? Is it possible this will be available within a month or two?
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I have heard that there are some plans to eventually enable the USB port to allow it to be used as a full fledged USB port similarly to how the Apple wireless N router is used so that an external USB HDD can be plugged in and shared over the network. Is there any timeframe on when this might become available? Is it possible this will be available within a month or two?
bump
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I have heard that there are some plans to eventually enable the USB port to allow it to be used as a full fledged USB port similarly to how the Apple wireless N router is used so that an external USB HDD can be plugged in and shared over the network. Is there any timeframe on when this might become available? Is it possible this will be available within a month or two?
I would be very interested in this new feature. I hope the developer team includes it in a future firmware release.
Can somebody confirm if there's a possibility for this to happen?
Thanks.
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I would be very happy to see this feature added. Keeping my fingers crossed!
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I would also love to see this feature!
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Sorry to be the guy. I would rather see processing and memory power used to improve the functionality it already has. But then again I didn't want routers to have more than a built-in 4 port switch, little alone a wireless AP.
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I would go as far as to be more of the guy, skip the switch logic and ports and just give me a router.
I could skip on DNS relay, DHCP servers, and even the web GUI. I really don't don't need any filtering, QoS, wireless, USB drive, print servers, or jovial closures either!
Wanna go for Goldblatt's star? Sell a consumer router with 3+ interfaces and get this, the ability to do manual routing, this ability to add static routes but not interface addresses doesn't count either.
In other words I want to have the enterprise style solution on a home-ish budget. I would spend more and get more. Though I seem to recall my first D-Link router was just the 2 interfaces (and had a lot more real options, and a whole lot less fluff), it still works! This seems to imply I need a time machine not a new toy!
Prolly a good thing I don't make these decisions.
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I want a usb attached hard drive to work as well.
In response to the individuals above me, try using openwrt on some cheap piece of hardware (linksys) and just turn off all the features you don't need. That sounds like that's what you want.
As for me, I want to attach a hard drive to this sucker. I spent enough on it.
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The problem with attached storage at the router level is two-fold.
1) The router requires more internal NV memory for the code that is required to make the NAS function work. This drives the cost of the device even higher.
2) Resource management at the router level, now instead of the NAT CPU handling QoS and network transmissions it would be handling the sessions to the NAS as well. This is very taxing on a 325Mhz CPU. This is also taxing on the switch CPU ( not to be confused with the NAT cpu).
In short, AWDL hit the nail on the head, although his views are a bit more "extreme" then mine they follow the same path. However I could see where limited NAS support for say, thumb drives or small HD's could be utilized for file distribution or limited sharing.
It's my guess that you'd see a print server on this device way before NAS.
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I highly doubt CPU speed is the issue here. I'd more readily expect it to be limited by ram and flash rom. I don't expect break-through speed, just enough to play music off of. Also the switch processor wouldn't be any more taxed than it would if I implemented a NAS on a separate server or appliance.
Even more likely is the fact that D-link doesn't want to create a cheap product that will negate the market for their NAS adapters. That I might understand. I wouldn't like it, but I'd understand.
Dave.
Oh yeah, I'm an embedded Linux engineer in the day-time.
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Well then knowing what you know think of it this way:
/* Begin Rant Here
How much space must you add to the file system for SMB handling, associated libraries, FTP server, web controls, and don't forget the settings which also have to go into NV storage.
Then consider that you know that the engineers usually (I am making an assumption here, though I feel it should stand, feel free to tell me how you do it at work) fill the available space on release code. Compare that to the size of the 1.11 firmware (in the neighborhood of 1,376,256 bytes according to Windows file properties). True the firmware is compressed, but most of that was binaries, which aren't famous for compressing terribly well.
What gets cut first a new feature or an old respected (and advertised) feature?
While we are at it I might mention that the 1.03 release firmware for the DNS-323 is over 7 MB (7,400,091 bytes by File Properties in Win-Zip), and this and a print server is all that device does!
Now lets add as a bare minimum that much space into RAM (so we can execute those binaries and display those controls). In reality much more will be needed for file buffers (both SMB and FTP).
Are we now violating the designed memory footprint and are going to be locked in waits for RAM?
Now we can discuss CPU cycles, both of the new required daemons are expensive on a constant basis and really expensive during a read or write. Is is possible these spikes are going to get us into a lock for CPU even if only periodically. Also fun to consider is that the traffic which causes a spike in the file daemons also corresponds to a spike on the core functionality, I believe this is what Lycan was referring to by taxing the switch CPU. Then consider that all the functions of this device are real time network functions and adding a thousand cycles to every QoS packets processing time as it gets paged out and in repeatedly will defeat the purpose.
Now we can make the business argument (and the one that should hit closest to home for you). How many developer hours does it take to implement these features? We are not dealing with an open and heavily developed platform like Linux here (given this router has no GPL code on D-Link's site), there is a real possibility that these tools do not exist for this OS. When a feature doesn't work or needs improvement, how many development hours will be spent fixing it.
Compare that to the amount of additional income (0$ per unit), it's true a few more unit's might be sold, but how do you forecast that to justify the business expense (especially given that there is already a near saturated market for that feature [this is where the DNS-323 comes into the picture])? How many don't get sold or get returned due to above performance hits, or the wave of bad reviews proclaiming that the device is unusably slow with modern release code.
As a final salvo I might add that D-Link produced routers with storage code thrown in in the past and they never sold very well (I'm pointing at you DI-624S).
I don't know what kind of embedded application you work with, but this should all be familiar to you.
End Rant Here *\
Now that that is out of my system, a feature request is perfectly welcome, stating that you think you know better than the people developing the device as to what is feasible is sophmoronic.
I am not one of these people, however I think the above sums up the first layer arguments against it. I made a significant number of assumptions above and if you want to discuss then then I think this should be fun.
Though I must stress that at no point do either I or you know exactly how much overhead exists in RAM, ROM, or cycles in which to fit these features. For all I know we have plenty of room, I just don't think that it is safe to assume as much and use that assumption to tell the most knowledgeable person here (the moderator Lycan) that his reasoning doesn't work for you.
I might also add that that the thoughts of Lycan, AWDL, and Rara Avis (listed in order of extreme thought) represent a sane viewpoint in my opinion (though Rara might be going a little far).
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So you agree with me and lycan that RAM/rom size is likely to be a big issue? You also seem to agree with me that it's hard to make a business case for the feature. All in all good rant man.
For your information, the DIR-655 uses Ubicom StreamEngine 5160 (fancy ass MIPS cpu with specialized cryptography running at somewhere between at 220Mhz, and 325Mhz), with a Vitesse VSC7385 switch CPU. http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/30087/96/1/1/
It has 16 Meg of ram and likely 4 meg of ROM
http://wiki.openwrt.org/TableOfHardware?action=show&redirect=toh
As far as how much hardware overhead this gives you, you're right I don't know. However, I also know that 95% of the time I'm not coming close to fully utilizing any of these resources.
So if it's a hardware constraint, I still think that it's Ram/Rom that's likely causing the restriction. You also brought up another good point, in that I don't know what OS it's running. If it was running embedded linux, adding a minimalist samba server should be fairly trivial *(3-6 months of developer time in order to implement all the interfaces, and user-interaction cases). I'd then hope that d-link shares a significant amount of code between their router boxes. So that initial investment would likely benefit all later product lines. If I had to choose between a device that had no nas server, and one that had a slow nas server, I'd probably pick the one with the slow nas server.
If it's running some other OS (and I've been down that road professionally as well), then you are correct the development effort would way outweigh the benefits. At that point you may as well just convert to an embedded Linux.
Oh yeah, I was one of those people who didn't purchase a DIR-624S, I ended up with something else back then. That's because the nas feature was about a $40 bump from an equivalently priced non-nas router.
I'm not looking for a speed demon, I just want something that will let me stream my MP3s to other parts of the house.
Also just because companies don't say they are running embedded linux doesn't mean they aren't. As I understand GPL, you don't have to make code available unless you modify it.
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The GPL states that using any GPL material creates an requirement to redistribute that source. In D-Link's case that would be listed on http://support.dlink.com/GPL.asp.
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Let me set both of your hearts at ease. It is NOT running a Linux based OS. It's a Ubicom SDK running a proprietary OS.
The NAT is indeed Ubicom. In truth it's the latter model noted by Npoc. It is the IP5160 at 275Mhz. This being said, in my environment at home that NAT CPU is running flatout allmost all the time. I can understand your desire and application, in fact I've wanted the same. However, I've seen where implementations such as this can take us and it's almost never pretty, cost effective or just reasonable for the limited functionality improvement thats gained.
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Let me set both of your hearts at ease. It is NOT running a Linux based OS. It's a Ubicom SDK running a proprietary OS.
That's what I figured. Oh well, one can always dream. Or maybe I can just contact Ubicom, and suggest USB storage file serving as an addition to their SDK. It might make a lot more business sense for them. One more feature that their customers can easily implement.
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I really donŽt know nothing about engineers talk... I only know as an USER that DLink is going down to me this way.... a cheap Asus router have USB feature... and DLink specialist canŽt do this thing??? shame on DLink
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Obviously you failed to read what I wrote, it's not that we can't its that we don't want to. The detriment to over all performance to appease a niche buyer is not good business sense.
If you want storage, buy storage, if you want Print server, buy a print server. Heck, the DNS 323 offers both.
We determined that the performance losses were sizable and could not be ignored to offer such a negledgable feature.
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Sorry to ask that, but how hard you (D-Link team) test it? I didnŽt read you saying "well we test it to the limit and performance was decreased"... plus, you can release a firmware with big red letters saying: "USB active BUT performance decrease 50%" and let customer choose....
I already have storage (external net hdd), but will makes me happy download torrents without PC on... makes me happy share my FTP with my PC off... makes me happy plug a pen drive in my router and all network access without my PC on... makes me happy share my printer without my PC on... makes me happy contribute to the war against 'global heating' .... makes me happy spend less electrial energy... youŽve got my point?
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We determined that the nature of the device was ROUTING, not network storage. There are many things to take in consideration when adding this type of functionality to a high end Gaming/multimedia mased router. The cons out weighed the pros for us.
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ok, I understand... well, youŽre the boss...
But, please, let make a little customer sugestion for the good name of D-Link, put a BIG observation in D-Link routers packages, coz there are tons of ppl buying D-Link routers thinking the back USB port is a really USB port.... was not my case, but I honestly thought this wolud be a matter of time to happen... I even see sellers making advertisement about USB capabilities....
I really think you, D-Link Techical engineers are very busy... there are some HOLES now to cover in DIR-655... IŽm sure you understand me ;)........
IŽll let you work in a real problem and forget about USB
best regards
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The package is "odd" for lack of a better term. i agree.