TomatoUSB

I've been looking at old forum posts about improving the hard disk speed of a USB shared via routers and there was some suggestion in one of the threads that hard disks are faster in this context if formatted to ext3 or ext2 format (See the "E4200 Disk Preformance" thread from Feb 2012). I am on a Windows PC, I just bought a 2TB external hard drive today which was cheap and the first thing I've set out to do is get it into the proper format. It is currently NTFS. Unfortunately there is no ext3 or ext2 option for formatting it via Windows, the only option besides NTFS is exFAT.

Out of those two, which should I use?

And secondly, does the RT-N16 with Tomato support use of two hard disks, one in each USB port?

I'm guessing that if I were to use both, the path names would be "/mnt/<disk1 label>/<my download directory> and "/mnt/<disk2 label>/<my other download directory>", but I figured since I'm not doing anything with this new disk until I have it formatted properly it's probably better to ask. ;)

Thanks

I can answer my own question about using two hard disks… yes. Still keen to hear if anyone has anything to say about the format issue though.

You can partition it and format it to ext2 or ext3 (much better since it is journaled) on the RT-N16 itself.

Partition with

fdisk /dev/sdX

Format with

mke2fs -j -L label /dev/sdXN

Ok, major noob question here… I assume I send those commands to the router with Telnet, right?

I assume I send those commands to the router with Telnet, right?

It is not so much send but yes Telnet gets you a command line interface although ssh is generally preferred. In this case ssh does pretty much what telnet does but over a secure channel. With in a LAN, it does not really make much difference.

I made this recommendation in the past and will make it again.

Do not waste your time trying to use your Tomato Router (ASUS RT-N16) as a NAS (or Transmission Client/SABNZBD, etc). You will not be happy with the performance. You'll only get 4-7MB transfer speed (CPU bottleneck) that's with nothing else running. If you have Tranmission running or other things its probably even going to be worst.

Instead, get a $20-25 Pogoplug and install ArchLinuxArm on it and setup SAMBA and all the other things you would like to run on your Tomato Router.

However, to answer you original question. You shouldn't use either NTFS or exFAT. I suggest you install Shibby's version of TomatoUSB which includes the necessary disk partitioning and formatting tools included in the firmware. Use ext2/ext3 as recommended.

See this tutorial - http://uk.nyclee.net/2012/04/28/installing-optware-in-tomato-usb-shibby/

Would it be worthwhile reformatting a 16G USB drive into ext3, for torrent purposes?

Would that result in higher maximum download speeds?

(Yes, I'm well aware that torrent speed is mostly about how well seeded the torrent is and my line noise etc, but I'm talking about under ideal circumstances here.)

Ditto to what grayman4hire said.
This is a router which happens to be able to share USB drives. It is not a NAS, and will never be a NAS.
It's like the dancing bear … the marvel is not that it dances so well, the marvel is that it dances at all.

Would it be worthwhile reformatting a 16G USB drive into ext3, for torrent purposes? Would that result in higher maximum download speeds?

Probably not, and no.

It's probably a bad idea anyway. A USB stick formatted in anything other than FAT is not going to be usable on anything except a Linux system. Don't do it.