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Nighthawk D7800 Readyshare with Ext4 external hard drive not detected
Firmware: V1.0.1.42
The manual for this device states that the router supports full read/write access for compatible USB devices formatted as Ext4. My Seagate Expansion 3TB shows up in advanced USB settings as a connected device, but it is not in the Readyshare settings (both basic and advanced).
The hard drive is brand new, formatted to ext4 in Ubuntu 18.10 through the terminal by the following steps:
sudo fdisk /dev/sdb
(in fdisk util):
d
n
t
20
w
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb1
sudo chown -R jordan:jordan /media/jordan/external
I specifically bought this router to be able to use readyshare with ext4 formatted drives. The device mounts fine on Ubuntu.
The external hard drive was bought brand new today.
I had to resort to using NTFS. I also had to change the partition table to MBR instead of GPT. Not a massive deal in the end, seems to be performing fine... The only downside is the max partition size for MBR is 2TB, but I think that other partitions will appear as separate shares (think I read that somewhere?) so when I need the extra space I'll make another partition using the remaining 1TB and see how we go!
It'd be a good if we could get an answer on the right ext4 configuration to get it working, as it says it's supported in the manual so it's quite disappointing that it's not working. Granted there are a lot of ext4 options that aren't supported everywhere, thus some documentation on ext4 compatible configuration would be nice.
3 Replies
ReadyShare is picky about the USB drives it accepts.
This list will give you some clues, although it is far from comprehensive:
ReadySHARE USB Drives Compatibility List | Answer | NETGEAR Support
I had to resort to using NTFS. I also had to change the partition table to MBR instead of GPT. Not a massive deal in the end, seems to be performing fine... The only downside is the max partition size for MBR is 2TB, but I think that other partitions will appear as separate shares (think I read that somewhere?) so when I need the extra space I'll make another partition using the remaining 1TB and see how we go!
It'd be a good if we could get an answer on the right ext4 configuration to get it working, as it says it's supported in the manual so it's quite disappointing that it's not working. Granted there are a lot of ext4 options that aren't supported everywhere, thus some documentation on ext4 compatible configuration would be nice.
Gibrahh wrote:
The only downside is the max partition size for MBR is 2TB, but I think that other partitions will appear as separate shares (think I read that somewhere?) so when I need the extra space I'll make another partition using the remaining 1TB and see how we go!
I would check that before filling the drive.
Past discussions here suggest that ReadyShare will see only one partition on a connection. The second partition never shows up.
Until recently, the limit for drives seemed to be 4TB. Then someone reported getting their 6TB drive to work. But other attempts to get drives that big failed. So a lot depends on the drive.
