Amped Wireless TAP-R2 Touch Screen Wireless Router Review

Amped Wireless TAP-R2: Attached Storage Testing

One of the major components of these next-generation routers is the ability for them to double as home-ready Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices. If a person didnt want to spend a lot of money for a stand-alone NAS unit which could cost hundreds of dollars for a 2TB unit, an integrated solution that allows you to add a USB Flash drive for much less might be perfect. Of course the question is how good is the performances of these routers when it comes to attached storage.

For our Router Storage test, we used the very popular ATTO Disk Benchmark to measure transfer speeds of our routers USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports. ATTO measures raw transfer rates for both Read and Write plotting them in a graph that is easy to understand. We ran our routers with this test with default ATTO settings of 0.5 KB up through 8192.0 KB transfer sizes with the total length being 256 MB.

The folks at Kingston were kind enough to send over a Kingston DataTraveler HyperX 3.0 64GB USB drive ($60.00 shipped) for our tests. The Kingston HyperX USB 3.0 Flash drive is rated conservatively at 225MB/s read and 135MB/s write. On our test system we were able to get 300MB/s read and 160MB/s write speeds on the DTHX30/64GB. Those speeds should be well over what this generation routers can support. We wanted to make sure the write speeds would be high enough not to bottleneck the benchmarks of these next generation routers.

Benchmark Results: Well, even though the Amped Wireless TAP-R2 is not considered a flagship product, we were hoping for better results from the USB attached storage speeds. At 4.15 MB/sec Read and 4.45 MB/sec Write, we would hardly recommend using the port for those that require fast attached storage speeds. I guess the idea of a USB port is a good one for things like printing or other tasks where speed isn’t a necessity, but frankly it bothers me that the performance could be so slow.