USB Harddisk with Router P-2812HNUL-F1

MET · July 2020

Hello,

I am testing to get a harddisk accessible via the WLAN network:

1) I noticed that one harddisk is not recognised at all and an other one is recognised. What are the required conditions that the harddisk is recognised?

2) The harddisk which is recognised by the router could not be made accessible on a client with Windows 10 which has been defined in the router as user. Windows does not find the USB device in the network.

Some help to get it working is very much appreciated. Thank you.

Regards, MET

Mijzelf · July 2020

Perfectly possible. The router runs Linux, and NTFS is not native to Linux. (FAT isn't either, but is much easier to implement).

Some years ago I played around with the stock firmware on that router, and when I remember well it doesn't support anything (aside of the internal flash filesystems) but FAT. Not even native Linux filesystems like ext3.

MET · July 2020

2) could be solved, was related to the configuration in W10.

Regarding

1) Could it be because the two harddisks which I used for testing were differently formatted? The one which worked was FAT32 and the one which the router did not recognise NFTS.

Mijzelf · July 2020

Perfectly possible. The router runs Linux, and NTFS is not native to Linux. (FAT isn't either, but is much easier to implement).

Some years ago I played around with the stock firmware on that router, and when I remember well it doesn't support anything (aside of the internal flash filesystems) but FAT. Not even native Linux filesystems like ext3.

MET · July 2020

Thanks! That makes it clear that the SSD which I intend to connect has to be FAT-formatted.

MET · July 2020

I noticed that Routers from other manufacturers may have compability problems with certain storage devices and published for this purpose compatibility tables. Are also the Zyxel-Routers only compatible with certain, selected storage devices and how could I know which one would work with the P-2812HNUL-F1 BEFORE buying it? Are there limits on the size of the storage device? Or is it really only required to be FAT32-formatted?

Mijzelf · July 2020

I noticed that Routers from other manufacturers may have compability problems with certain storage devices and published for this purpose compatibility tables.

Did you actually find tables containing not-compatible devices, or only 'known-working' devices? AFAIK every compliant USB mass storage device should work.

Are there limits on the size of the storage device? Or is it really only required to be FAT32-formatted?

As you will have noticed the documentation doesn't tell anything about it (as far as I could find). But I wouldn't expect the kernel to support GPT, which means you have to use an MBR partition table, or no partition table at all. The first one limits you to 2TiB usable space, the second one is theoretically unlimited, but FAT32 cannot exceed 2TiB either.

Yet I don't think it's a good idea to use that size of FAT32 filesystems. It's not very rugged, and a small error can multiply itself easily. Further error checking of a 2TiB filesystem over USB will take ages.

If you really want big filesystems connected to that router, I would install OpenWrt on it, and use ext3 as filesystem. (I actually have OpenWrt on my 2812. Works great. Yet I'm not using it as NAS) But only do that if you're comfortable with Linux and the commandline.

MET · July 2020

Thank you, Mijzelf, for your explantations; they were very helpful for my learning and decision making process.

USB Harddisk with Router P-2812HNUL-F1

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