Didn't know whether to post it here or in the Video Games section - so its in the wrong section, please move it.

I am moving to a new apartment and trying to decide which router to get.

The things that will be in a network:

Macbook Pro 13"'
HP Mini
Linksys Wireless Camera (m# WVC54GCA)
Xbox 360 (wired or wireless)
External Hard Drive (Seagate FreeAgent 1.5TB)
Samsung TV (UN40B7000) (wired or wireless)
2 iPhones
Brother Network printer

Router choice:
Airport Extreme MC340LL/A $173 or
Linksys WRT160NL $105

My goal - to have the external hard drive plugged into the router, so that I can access its content via the laptops, the xbox and the tv. As well as plug the printer directly into the router. The camera will also be connected to the router via wireless so that I can access it from a remote location.

I always prefer Apple products, but if Linksys can fit my needs then I rather save a little $.

So - which router will suit me best?

Thanks in Advance

 

I would give it a go with the Linksys. Seems to have all the qualities you are looking for for a lot less money.

 

For a few bucks more I'd get a dual band wireless n router.. I'm not a big fan of linksys but they're pretty robust. Trust me.. dual band is the way to go. Look up WRT320N.. Netgear makes a decent dual band router as well.

 

Whatever is on sale at Bestbuy...

 

Unfortunately WRT320N doesnt have a USB port for my external drive

And for me linksys has been much better than netgear, go figure

 

Be wary of needing some sort of software to access the device connected to the USB port on the router. My dlink dir-655 has a USB port but I have to use their shareport utility in order to access the device connected to the router. It's annoying but other than that I'm in love with this router, they keep adding new features with almost every firmware update.

I used to have a an Airport router, it was the worst overpriced piece of shit router I've ever used. I'll never use another one. At the time it cost $225 only had ONE ethernet port and you couldn't have DHCP enabled and still reserve an IP address to one PC, you also couldn't do port forwarding with DHCP on. Oh and it's wifi range was shit too! I fucking hated that thing. You must be saying to yourself how could it cost $225 and be fucking worthless? Cause it's from Apple and it looked like a space ship, that's got to worth $225, right?



The Apple is dual band. But doesn't your computers wifi adapter have to support dual band (5ghz), most wifi adapters are 2.4ghz?

 

My bad.. I thought it had a usb connection. The WRT610N has one but it's more expensive, yet still less than the apple router. Wireless N adapters with dual band capability are fairly cheap.

 

Perhaps: http://slickdeals.net/forums/showthread.php?t=1881946

Looks like you can put tomato on it and download usb drivers to get it to network your external drive. It's only wireless G though.

 

I have a D-Link DIR-628 (RangeBooster N Dual Band).

For some reason D-link works the best. Have never had a problem with this router... covers our entire house, plus the backyard, so we can be online by the pool.

We've had it for some time now and I really do not have anything bad to say about it.

 

Looks good !

I think I'll order the linksys and this Asus one and see which one will work best

Is that a good idea?

 

Definitely get the linksys

 

Update

the linksys hard drive has difficulty "seeing" my Hard drive, even though it's plugged into it. I have a feeling it's because it's formatted to ntfs and not fat. I really don't want to format a harddrive that has 1tb of info on it; but I may have to do that.

The asus on the other hand needs to have custom software installed on it, which I started doing yesterday and had to stop, hopefully will resume today and give you more updates

 

If you format a 1tb drive as fat you will need to make many partitions. fat has a 4gb limit.

 

I thought the 4gb limit was on the transfers, not on the maximum size.


Could this work?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148496

 

UPDATE:

I installed tomato on the Asus router and it works exactly as planned. Both my macbook and the hp mini can see the hard drive content. I started configuring the TV to work, will probably finish tomorrow and then will start on the PS3.

 

Glad to hear it worked!

 

I like tomato. I've ran it on my Linksys for a couple year now. Nice software.