NETGEAR is aware of a growing number of phone and online scams. To learn how to stay safe click here.
Forum Discussion
Netgear RAXE500 SMB (SAMBA) Readyshare USB3.0 slow/ buggy on Android
Hi, just bought the RAXE500 router to replace the RAX80. I'm very happy with the WiFI performance on it compared to my previous RAX80. The only issue which I and many others I believe are facing ...
The workaround for playing High Bitrate files I suppose is using a DLNA player instead of the normal SMB (Samba) server on Android.
And for transferring files FTP works best for android.
Samba is slow on this router.
Even my older WiFi 5 router, Netgear R7800 can get me upto 30 Mb/sec writes and reads through SMB samba, so 6-7 Mb/sec on Android is nothing. Only good for 1080p videos.
And for transferring files FTP works best for android.
Samba is slow on this router.
Even my older WiFi 5 router, Netgear R7800 can get me upto 30 Mb/sec writes and reads through SMB samba, so 6-7 Mb/sec on Android is nothing. Only good for 1080p videos.
For me, on Android, both my R7800 and RAXE500, the SMB performance is the same for both USB 3 connected drives and eSATA. Though on desktop, the eSATA performance on the R7800 is much higher with some 3rd party firmware, hitting 90+MB/s while USB 3.0 will be in the 70MB/s range.
The SMB performance issues with android are weird with no real consistency between devices, which performance all over the place on low end, mid range, and high end devices.
The same applies to older SMB standards such as SMB 1.5 on older 802.11n based routers with speeds still in the 6-7MB/s range. This is with high end ones from the time period (WNDR4700) which has a read speed of about 98MB/s and a write speed of 45MB/s, using an internal hard drive that came with my WNDR4700.
Overall for SMB I am not sure if router makers can do much to improve smartphone performance with them. It seems that router makers go with fairly standard implementations, and smartphone makers simply aren't focusing their development time on improving performance for SMB traffic.
As for speeds in relation to video playback, 5MB/s is enough for most h.264 4K 10 bit HDR content, as they are typically in the 20-30mbps range, though it will not handle h.264 4K 10 bit with 4:2:2 sampling, though in those conditions, h.265 will work.
If you would like to test that, you will see that launching a video over smb using a file explorer app that supports it, and then directly opening the video using VLC for android, you will see that that combination of videos will play smoothly.
Beyond that, VLC player's own browser rather than launching through another app is capable of reaching higher speeds by launching multiple connections for newer SMB versions (though that behavior would normally reduce performance for a desktop PC since SMB in general encounters more overhead from it, but on android the benefits there outweigh the inefficiencies.
I can assure it's firmware related, as this SMB problem wasn't there on the RAX80, it's with their newer router RAXE300 & RAXE500.
They can add an option on the ReadyShare menu for choosing the smb v1, v2, v3, but I guess Netgear engineers are too lazy to add anything.
ASUS routers have the option to select smb v1 + smb v2 together or either of them.
The customization on Netgear routers are pretty much limited for these things, but I found Netgear WiFI routers to work better for my region.
The Netgear distributes solid WiFi even at the furthest corner of my house.
Asus have very weak signals compared to Netgear, but Asus do have more customization related to SMB.
The SAMBA (SMB) needs to be fixed, add that to the known issues.
The SMB file server is buggy for Android devices, and requires you to enter username and password each time you access something eventhough the username/password is unchecked on the GUI of the router.
Added to that, the speed is capped between 5-6 MB/sec for Android Devices.
Request: It is believed that the new SMB version on the router is causing the issue, so if Netgear can add a feature where one could select the smb version on the GUI of the router's ReadyShare menu, that would be grateful.
Note: Once again, just to be very clear, It's only a problem on Android devices.
It would be better if Netgear offered more control over the storage settings. From many different routers that they have released, they tend to implement their storage similar to how Linksys has been implementing it where they take the latest SMB implementation and apply the standard/ default type configuration that Microsoft would use as a default. Beyond that, outside of configuration settings for choosing whether to set a password or not, they keep all other default security functions enabled.
Ideally, it would be good if they could offer a level of control similar to what you would fine in free NAS software such as TrueNAS Core, which while not offering every possible variable, it offers enough control to tailor the compatibility for all of your devices, and essentially allowing the user to balance security, performance and compatibility.
Anyway, if you have a PC running windows 10 or later, access the SMB storage of the router that doesn't have the performance issue (or even map it as a network drive), then you can open powershell as administrator, and then run the command
Get-SmbConnectionAfter running that command, it should tell you which SMB version is being used. That will at least help to narrow down which SMB version your smartphone does best in when it comes to a default implementation of it.