Today many of us are faced with an ever escalating amount of personal data that can at times seem like a major hassle to manage and maintain. Sure, the cloud is becoming an increasingly convenient way to store messages, emails, photos and even your lowly mp3 collection, but when it comes to the larger file sizes involved with maintaining your HD media collection, the emergence of the Home Cloud and Network Attached Storage takes on much more significance.

Storage device manufacturers are wise to the dilemmas that consumers face, and the fact is that not all of us are geeks that are willing to build our own storage device from the ground up using old PC parts as we perhaps were in the past. And why would you when there are some many great options out there from a wide variety of vendors?

Today we have a chance to hone in on a Home Cloud solution from renowned storage device vendor Thecus with a review of the company’s N2560 NAS (Network Attached Storage).

The Thecus N2560 Network Attached Storage

In the broader NAS world of 2015 you can identify two distinct categories of NAS; those based on the proprietary Windows Home Server OS and those based on a Linux (usually Debian) derived OS. The Thecus N2560 belongs in the latter category and is positioned as a the ideal solution for Small or Home Office environments. It features two SATA 3.5 inch hard drive bays, an Intel Atom processor, 2GB of RAM, lots of connectivity options, all housed in a compact sleek design that is optimized to look the part in your living room as well as your home office.

The Thecus N2560 can be found for retail at a price point of around $230-$240 USD which means that it is by no means the cheapest two-bay NAS option out there. Thecus are not aiming for the entry-level however, bringing together a storm of advanced features that includes low power and low noise operation, a HDMI output so it can be used as a straight up media streaming device, plus a plethora of apps and utilities designed to help you get the most out of your NAS.

Thecus N2560 NAS: Full Specifications

• Intel Atom CE5335 processor (1.6GHz Dual-core)
• 2GB DDR3
• 2 x SATA 3.0
• Supports RAID 0,1 and JBOD
• Hot-swappable HDD support
• Gigabit LAN 10/100/1000 Base-TX
• Wake-on-LAN Support
• 2 x USB 2.0 host port (rear)
• 1 x USB 3.0 host port (front)
• HDMI Port (rear)
• SPDIF (rear)
• Power, USB Copy and Reset Buttons
• 166mm x 114mm x 210mm

The retail package contains an Ethernet cable, power adapter plus power cord, quick installation guide, warranty card and the ubiquitous All in One Driver DVD. There are also four white plastic strips which you use to mount the hard drives.

If we consider the basic specification list of the N2560 we can immediately see that the device actually has a reasonable amount of performance packed into a small form factor device. Intel Atom processors used to be regarded as offering the bare minimum when it came raw horsepower, but the newer CE5335 is a low power multi-media processor that packs a PowerVR Graphics Processor from Imagination Technologies. The platform delivers solid playback of Full HD video streaming content and enough grunt to keep things snappy. The Dual-core Intel Atom chip is backed by a reasonably solid 2GB of DDR3 and manages to offer read and write speeds that are well within our expectations. In terms of pure hardware components, it’s difficult to find fault.

The post Thecus Can Do Better: N2560 NAS Review appeared first on VR World.

With the introduction of the Wi-Fi ac standard and mainstream availability of the Wi-Fi ac modems in smartphones and current-generation notebooks, routers that provide bandwidth to handle 1 Gbit/sec Wi-Fi ac transfer rates have become standard. Vendors that manufacture modems for the routers have also been tweaking away to achieve higher bandwidth and more throughput. One such hardware manufacturer who has enjoyed a modicum of success in this segment is Broadcom, who recently unveiled its BCM4709A SoC, which is the hardware that powers Netgear’s R7000 Nighthawk, the manufacturer’s first offering in the Wi-Fi AC1900 segment.

Hardware

The R7000 Nighthawk features 600Mbps on the 2.4GHz band and 1300Mbps on the 5GHz band, which is achieved by enabling 256-QAM modulation (which Broadcom is marketing as TurboQAM ) on the Broadcom BCM4360 radios that power the router. The R7000 features two Broadcom 3×3 BCM4360 Gigabit transceivers, one for the 2.4GHz band and the other for the 5GHz band. In the 2.4GHz band, each spatial stream can provide throughput of 200Mbps via TurboQAM technology, which is 50Mbps more than what is achieved by standard Gigabit transceivers. This allows for an overall transmission throughput of 600Mbps, a considerable increase over the 450Mbps boasted by Wi-Fi AC1750 routers.

Another area of differentiation between Wi-Fi AC1900 and Wi-Fi AC1750 routers is that the AC1750 class routers usually feature a 802.11ac Gigabit transceiver for the 5GHz band and a 802.11n transceiver for the 2.4GHz band, which allows vendors to reduce on the manufacturing costs of the router.

The Netgear R7000 Nighthawk suffers from no such drawbacks, as vendors are aiming for the $200 mark with the Wi-Fi AC1900 class routers. For that kind of money, you get a router which has a 1 GHz dual-core processor in the Broadcom BCM4709A, 256 MB RAM, 128 MB flash memory for the firmware along with the two aforementioned Gigabit BCM4360 transceivers.

The design of the router is also befitting one that is marketed as a high-end product, with angular lines and a matte finish that is immune to smudges. With dimensions of 285 x 184 x 50mm and an overall weight of 750g, the R7000 is one the widest and heaviest routers in the market. The Nighthawk takes its name from the USAF F-117 Nighthawk, and as such is modelled after the fighter aircraft. The angular design and sheer size of the R7000 means it to stand out from any other router currently available today. Another interesting design choice is the inclusion of white LEDs for status indicators at the front for Wi-Fi, LAN and WAN. The indicator lights turn orange whenever there is an issue with connectivity.

As far as connectivity goes, the R7000 Nighthawk features four Gigabit LAN ports at the back, a USB 3.0 port at the front, a Gigabit WAN port, a USB 2.0 port at the back and three antennae and hooks at the base that allow the router to be mooted on a wall. Considering the pricing, Netgear has seen fit to include features such as downstream QoS, which differentiates the R7000 from similar high-end routers like the Asus RT-AC68U, which offers upstream QoS. This feature allows for prioritising traffic so that tasks like gaming and video streaming take precedence over others. The R7000 also has Time Machine compatibility for Macs, ReadyShare Vault, a software client for Windows that gives users the ability to back up contents of a Windows machine to a hard drive connected via USB to the router, VPN service, an FTP server and a built-in DLNA and iTunes server.

Another feature that is included in the R7000 Nighthawk is Beamforming+, which is a radio wave technology included in the Wi-Fi 802.11ac standard that allows a router to transmit radio signals in the direction of a client device. While the R7000 is stuffed with features, most users getting a $200 router will be interested in the customisability, range and bandwidth.

Configuration

Configuring the R7000 Nighthawk is quite straightforward — connect the router to a wall socket, plug in the WAN network cable, and switch on the unit. For first time configuration, the router comes with a default Wi-Fi network, with the SSID and password printed on a label that comes along with the box and on the base of the router. Once you log in to the default network, the installation is handed off to Netgear Genie, the vendor’s configuration utility.

You can either let the install wizard guide you through the configuration, or manually change the settings yourself. You also have the ability to restore settings from a file. If you’re rather like us and like to configure the settings by yourself, you can navigate to the manual configuration and change settings via the browser-based interface. The interface has a host of settings that allow you to monitor the number of devices connected to your network, manage SSID settings, configure a guest network, set up parental controls and manage devices via USB through ReadyShare.

A useful feature on the R7000 is the ability to monitor your incoming and outgoing traffic via a traffic meter. If you’re on a limited data plan, this setting comes in handy as you can configure the router to change the status indicator to warn you when you’re near your data limit. You can also set the router to disable internet access entirely once you’ve exceeded your data limit.

Performance

With speeds of 600Mbps for the 2.4GHz band and 1300Mbps for the 5GHz band, the Nighthawk is one of the fastest routers in the market. However, to actually be able to test the advertised 600Mbps throughput on the 2.4GHz band, you need an AC1900 network card like the Asus PCE-AC68 with TurboQAM enabled. Once that’s installed, we can finally get down to testing the prowess of the Nighthawk.

We set up our router to a Synology NAS, ran a wired connector to a workstation and tested on several Wi-Fi ac enabled devices. First off, transferring files from the NAS was admittedly fast, as we averaged 60.45MBps reads and 40.2MBps writes. LAN to LAN throughput was at 950.3Mbps, with WAN to LAN at 910.6Mbps. USB transfers were also extremely fast, as we managed to get reads of 56.4MBps on USB 3.0, and 26.8MBps on USB 2.0.

At a distance of 25 meters behind solid walls and other obstructions, the R7000 pulled in 260.6Mbps on Wi-Fi ac. Reducing the distance to 10 meters with clear line of sight saw a dramatic increase to 521.5Mbps, while moving slightly farther away to 25 meters and obstructions netted 306.6Mbps. On the 2.4GHz band, the R7000 faltered slightly, as we only managed to achieve a maximum throughput of 186.9Mbps on the 40MHz bandwidth, and 97.6Mbps on 20MHz. In addition to the bandwidth, the R7000 offers stellar range, as the signal did not falter even once during our testing.

Conclusion

Netgear’s R7000 Nighthawk is one of the fastest, if not the fastest routers you can buy today. In addition to leading the field when it comes to throughput, the router offers stellar range and a host of features that differentiate it against other AC1900 routers, like the Asus RT-AC68U and Linksys WRT1900AC. One feature we’ve found to be useful when streaming content is downstream QoS, which is not offered by anyone else at the moment. For $199, the R7000 Nighthawk is the best router you can buy, considering that rival offerings cost slightly more at $229 for the RT-AC68U and $250 for the WRT1900AC.

The post Top Of Its Game: Netgear R7000 Nighthawk Review appeared first on VR World.

Asus has enjoyed a lot of success in the high-end router market with the last two generations of the RT-AC series in the RT-AC66U and the RT-AC68U. This summer, the Taiwanese hardware vendor is taking things to another level with the launch of the RT-AC87U, which is the first 802.11ac “Wave 2” router in the world. Wave 2 is a new set of standards that are being implemented by vendors into the 802.11 ac standard that sees the addition of new features like MU-MIMO, four spatial streams, wider channels (up to 160 MHz).

MU-MIMO functionality on the RT-AC87U is delivered through a Quantenna QSR1000 4×4 802.11ac MIMO chip. MU-MIMO groups multiple devices into a single transmission slot, making it easier to serve connected devices simultaneously, thereby freeing up bandwidth to connect even more devices. While MU-MIMO is interesting, there aren’t any clients to test it with, although Asus is set to roll out its EA-AC87 wireless client bridge later this month. As such, MU-MIMO while is enabled at the hardware level on the AC87U, it is not yet enabled in the firmware. Users will have to wait until Asus launches the EA-AC87 to make use of this feature.

The RT-AC87R and RT-AC87U are functionally the same model, with the only difference being that the “R” variant is exclusive to Best Buy. The “U” version is set to be available widely soon.

Hardware

The Asus RT-AC87U is an AC2400 class router, and can deliver a total bandwidth of 1733 Mbps for 4×4 enabled clients in the 5 GHz channel, and 600 Mbps via the 2.4 GHz channel delivered through 256-QAM. That’s the theoretical throughput – most consumer devices on the 2.4 GHz channel will not be able to take advantage of 256-QAM, in which case total bandwidth becomes 450 Mbps. Similarly, the lack of 4 x 4 enabled clients mean that Wi-Fi ac devices have a total bandwidth of 1300 Mbps available.

Although not the first router in the market to feature four antennas, the AC87U can stream from all antennas simultaneously as it supports four spatial streams. The Linksys WRTAC1900 also has four antennas, but it can only stream from three antennas at a time. Similarly, the Netgear R8000, which can drive two 5 GHz networks simultaneously, uses three antennas for each 5 GHz network.

At the front of the AC87U, there is an LED on/off button, which as the name suggests lets you enable or disable the LED notification lights. There is also a Wi-Fi on/off button on the left, and a covered USB 3.0 port on the right. The use of a flap adds to the aesthetics, but makes accessing the port difficult at times. The relocation of the USB 3.0 port to the front is to limit interference with the 2.4 GHz network. At the back, there’s a USB 2.0 port, WPS button, WAN port, four Gigabit LAN ports, power button, reset button and DC-IN.

Under the hood, the router comes with a 1 GHz Broadcom BCM4709A CPU, which is paired with a Quantenna QSR1000 that has a Synopsys ARC 700 32-bit RISC processor. A Broadcom BCM4360 drives the 2.4 GHz network and the USB ports. The AC87R also has 256 MB RAM and 128 MB flash memory.

Setup and features

Setting up an AC87R is easy thanks to Asus’ Quick Internet Setup. The wizard automatically connects to http://router.asus.com or you can enter http://192.168.1.1 to start the setup. Default SSIDs are ASUS and ASUS_5G, and while the default networks aren’t password protected, you are required to configure the SSID at the first stage of configuration, which involves setting a password for the networks.

Here’s a look at the wireless settings section on the AC87R:

The AC87R comes with a new QoS feature that is developed in collaboration with antivirus vendor Trend Micro. The QoS service scans traffic and automatically allocates device priority based on use case. For instance, a VoIP call or gaming client is assigned higher priority over other tasks, like P2P content sharing.

AiProtection is the second feature developed in conjunction with Trend Micro, and offers security-related features like delisting clients on the network that are found to be hosting malware. Enabling this feature will also automatically block known malware sites. Parental controls are now integrated into this feature, which new features in the AC87 being the ability to restrict access on a device-to-device basis.

The router has UPnP and iTunes servers for media streaming, and FTP for file sharing. Features like Smart Sync, which allows you to transfer the contents of a connected USB hard drive to Asus’s cloud storage solution, are good to have, but it would have been of much more value if users had the ability to connect other cloud storage solutions like Google Drive or OneDrive.

While Asus has not tweaked much in terms of general layout, the vendor has added a lot of new features. However, the router’s firmware is less than robust, as changing settings causes the AC87R to randomly turn off Wi-Fi radios or revert back to default settings. The firmware issues on the AC87R are all too familiar if you’ve used the AC66U or the AC68U. For now, all that’s left to do is wait for Asus to roll out firmware updates to fix these issues.

Performance

To be able to fully utilize the throughput offered by the AC87R, you need a 4×4 enabled client, or buy two of the routers and use one as a wireless bridge. Off the bat, MU-MIMO cannot be tested as it is not yet enabled in the firmware. In terms of USB 2.0 transfers, we were able to achieve 29.4 MBps read and 26.4 MBps write on an NTFS formatted drive. With the USB 3.0 port, we managed reads of 67.1 MBps and 48.9 MBps writes. Transfers from a NAS `through wired Ethernet were also commendable at 64.5 MBps reads and 45.2 MBps writes.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a high-end router, there are a lot of options available: the Netgear R7000 Nighthawk is the best choice under $200, and the Linksys WRT-AC1900 and the Asus RT-AC68U are available in the $200 – $250 segment. Newer routers like the Netgear R8000 and the RT-AC87R are closer to the $300 mark. For all of its hardware firsts, the AC87, like the AC66U and the AC68U before it, is let down by its firmware. If you’re content with using the default settings, the router functions admirably, but try to tweak anything, and it freezes. Asus is set to roll out firmware updates to address these issues, but what would have been better is it the vendor delayed the launch by a month or two and fix all bugs before releasing it to customers.

The post Asus RT-AC87U Review: The Best Asus Can Do? appeared first on VR World.