Netgear Nighthawk X4 AC2350 WiFi Router Review – Quad-Stream X4 Architecture

Router Network Attached Storage Tests

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: The Netgear Nighthawk X4 R7500 has two USB 3.0 ports and we tested the sequential Read and Write speeds for both of them and presented the averages in the chart above. As you can see the Netgear R7500 has a maximum sequential Read speed of 83 MB/s and an average Sequential Write speed of 30 MB/s. This is good news for those wanting to use an external SuperSpeed USB 3.0 hard drive or SSD for networked storage or some other network attached storage (NAS) device. Netgear said we should be in the 70-90 MB/s range for Reads and around 40 MB/s for Write speeds, so our Read speeds are spot on and our Write speeds were a littler lower than everyone expected. These speeds are certainly comparable to the Netgear R8000, but are much lower than the Linksys WRT1900AC that owned the expanded storage media test with over 100 MB/s on both sequential read and write file tests.