TomatoUSB

I just received my new ASUS RT-N16 router yesterday which I had planned to put TomatoUSB on. I tore into it right after dinner, felt like a kid at Christmas! LOL
It powered up but I could not contact it by wire or wireless. So I had already downloaded the latest ASUS Utilities and Firmware and proceeded to put the router in rescue mode and use the FW Restoration Utility to load that. It failed. I tried again. It failed again.
I uninstalled the ASUS Utilities and installed the version of the utilities included on the CD that came with the router. Now, I was able to use rescue mode w/ the FW Restoration Utility to successfully update to the latest ASUS firmware. However, I STILL could not access the router, wired or wirelessly.
I then proceeded to use the same procedure to load the latest TomatoUSBv2 build 54, and voila! Everything comes to life! I get into the Tomato Web GUI and find that it isn't picking up a DHCP lease from my ISP. So I do a second flash of the TomatoUSB firmware from there, being sure the check the clear NVRAM after flash box. Then it all worked!
So I was a happy camper! I was scared for a while, thought I was going to have to call ASUS…
Tweaked QoS, tweaked Advanced Wireless (with the help of inSSIDer v2, great SW!), got my USB HDD set up.
My USB drive was a brand new HD Elements 1TB drive, which was recognized immediately by TomatoUSB. Setting up File Sharing was painless. Unfortunately, the transfer rate to the drive from a wired desktop was only just under 2MB/sec. So I used a Linux live CD to reformat the main partition to ext3 instead of NTFS, and now it runs at 7-8MB/sec. Although I feel I should get more than that, even, but that is definitely acceptable. Any suggestions?
*FEATURE REQUEST* It would be nice to have a GUI option to reformat the external drive. I searched high and low and couldn't find anything. I'm sure I could've formatted from the console, but I didn't want to.
*FEATURE REQUEST* Improve NTFS performance?
*FEATURE REQUEST* Offer a spin down option in the GUI. While I'm at it, can somebody give me a newbie walk-through on adding a script to do the same thing? I think I remember seeing a thread about this but it wasn't clear to me on how to do it.
*FEATURE REQUEST* Add information in the status window as to whether the WAN and wired clients are connected at 10, 100, or 1000 Mbps Half/Full Duplex. Had this on my old D-Link and found it useful.
I plugged in my printer, a Brother HL-2140. TomatoUSB recognized it right away, and it also got assigned "lp0". However, when I set it up on my Windows 7 system, the Windows queue just sat there. It did this whether I used RAW/port 9100 or RAW/port 9101. I need HELP!
Lastly, web page performance is not as sparkly as I would like it. I have a 12/1.5 cableco connection, and speed tests online are showing that I am meeting and exceeding these levels. What I mean is, raw bandwidth is great, but page draws seem slower than they should be. This is on Chrome 8. This may be more of a Win7/Chrome tweaking question.
Anyways, TomatoUSB has been great so far. I am still amused that it worked when the ASUS firmware didn't!

7-8 MBs is pretty much the best anyone has seen. That is what I get with my RT-N16 and ext3.

As for spindown, see sd-idle-2.6 disk idle spindown program for 2.6 for the program I wrote.

How is the redraw on the Tomato Web GUI? That should be almost instantaneous. If so, then your slow web speed may be because you have congestion on your ISP link, and QOS would probably help.

@Toastman: The Tomato GUI is snappy. And come to think of it, when I browsed online using Chromium on a linux live cd, that was pretty quick too. I think I may need to tweak some Win7 settings.

@karog: Cool! So unpack the program to my HDD, then create a script with the .autorun extension and place it in the root of the mounted drive(single partition), then use the console to apply execute permissions to the script.

So unpack the program to my HDD, then create a script with the .autorun extension and place it in the root of the mounted drive(single partition), then use the console to apply execute permissions to the script.

That should do it. Of course you will need to reboot the router or umount and remount the drive or execute the script in the console. You can look in the syslog (Logs in the GUI) to see the messages it outputs for spinup and spindown.

Note that not all drives are compatible but most seem to be.

Update—
Solved my web browsing issues by turning off QoS completely. That's fine with me, I probably didn't have it set up right anyway.
Solved my printer issue by completely deleting the port and printer from windows, then recreating the port and printer together, fresh. Before, I was simply going into my existing printer properties and adding a new port.
Still need to add the spin down proggie…

@karog: could I just put the command in the Init tab of the Scripts under Advanced?

@David T, see the message dated Oct 2010, 12:09 GMT.

You don't want to use the Init script as the disk on which the program resides may not be mounted yet.