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I have encountered an unusual but consistently reproduceable problem where my R7000P/AC2300 router crashes completely within 3-4 hrs of plugging in a 3.5" USB 3 hard drive to share via the router. My router is running the most current firmware (V1.3.1.44_10.1.23). I have mostly MacOS and iOS devices connected but also have Windows 10 and Android devices. Without the hard drive attached, the router will run, without a problem for months on end without requiring a reboot. However I have been trying to add a 3 TB 3.5" hard drive (HGST drive in an Amazon basics USB 3.0 enclosure). The enclosure has its own power supply. When attached it mounts correctly, I can access it from any device on the network, and I can transfer files in both directions with no problems. However within 3-4 hrs I start getting compliaints from my familly that the internet is down and sure enough my router has crashed. I can't login to the router or even ping it (pings timeout) and disconnecting the drive while powered does nothing. I have to power it down and reboot it to restore service. If I reconnect the drive, the router will crash again in the same timeframe. Any suggestions?
Re: R7000P crashes when I attach my USB hard drive
One further update to my problem. Having tested a different drive in the 3.5" Amazon basics USB 3.0 enclosure, I did not encounter a crash of the router over about 8 hours. As a result I started doing diagnostics on the 3 Tb HGST drive that I had originally been trying to use. MacOS Disk Utility first aid could not find any problems with the disk or any of the partitions. However I decided to rebuild the directory on all three partitions with DiskWarrior to insure that they were good. The two smaller partitions rebuilt just fine. However the third partition (actualy the first I created on the disk) and the largest of the three had problems and failed to be rebuilt twice. Suspecting problems I completely reformatted and repartitioned the drive, this time with a single large partition. Having done this I am no longer encountering the error and the router has not crashed in more than 18hrs with the drive attached. This suggests that something in the directory corruption that existed on that partition was crashing the router.
While this portion of the mystery is solved, I am now getting an error when I attempt to connect to the drive from two computers on my network via afp://routerlogin.net. SMB connections still go through fine, but there is something about the AFP connection that is not working right but that might become a separate thread.
Thanks again to all of you who contributed suggestions and guidance!
Re: R7000P crashes when I attach my USB hard drive
Thank you for your response. The disk in question has three partitions all formatted HFS+ Journaled. I have not tested any other drives since I have no other USB 3 external enclosures. I have attemted to borrow a USB 3 enclosure fitted with a 2.5" SSD to see if that results in the same behavior. The enclosed drive is blank so I can format it in different ways to determine if the formatting has an effect on the failure. I will start with the same HFS+ Journaled format I am using on the other drive.
The last update was done automatically through the firmware web interface not manually and not through Genie and it was done within a couple days of the firmware release. I did not apply any .cfg files. I applied my preferred settings manually after the update. I have reset the router to defaults and retried the drive with the same result.
The mechanism in the 3.5" external enclosure identifies itself as VIA Labs Inc. for Amazon Basics. The list you linked to only seems to have branded external hard drives listed.
Re: R7000P crashes when I attach my USB hard drive
Are you sure the router can read/write HFS+ file systems? My R7800 is missing the hfs kernel module so I doubt it can support those. Better grab the manual of your model and go through it. I highly doubt it supports HFS+
Re: R7000P crashes when I attach my USB hard drive
It appears to have no problem with HFS+ disks. The router allows me to login via AFP from Finder by using afp://routerlogin.net so it would seem unlikely that Netgear would include native AFP support and not support HFS+. Additionally, during the 3-4 hrs before the eventual crash, I am able to write to the disk, read from the disk, and designate it as a time machine backup and complete a full backup to it. If I don't complete any operations (read, write, or backup) the router still crashes.
Re: R7000P crashes when I attach my USB hard drive
Thanks for the suggestion. Page 95 of the R7000P manual lists instructions for formatting an HFS+ hard drive with multiple partitions on a Mac for use with ReadyShare. It states that either MBR or GUID partition table can be used (I am using GUID for this drive). Based on this and the fact that the web interface will map all the partitions for me and allow me to choose guest access or password access demonstrates that this unit does support multiple partitions.
Re: R7000P crashes when I attach my USB hard drive
As a followup to my post yesterday, the 3.5" enclosue with the SSD that I installed has been attached and running fine for 18 hours without a crash. Since the SSD is formatted with HFS+/GUID partition table as was the 3.5" enclosure that crashed the router and the documentation supporting HFS+/GUID/multiple partitions I am beginning to think that the problem lies with either the 3.5" drive or the enclosure. I think I have another much smaller 3.5" drive that I can try to install in the enclosure to see if that makes a difference.
Re: R7000P crashes when I attach my USB hard drive
One further update to my problem. Having tested a different drive in the 3.5" Amazon basics USB 3.0 enclosure, I did not encounter a crash of the router over about 8 hours. As a result I started doing diagnostics on the 3 Tb HGST drive that I had originally been trying to use. MacOS Disk Utility first aid could not find any problems with the disk or any of the partitions. However I decided to rebuild the directory on all three partitions with DiskWarrior to insure that they were good. The two smaller partitions rebuilt just fine. However the third partition (actualy the first I created on the disk) and the largest of the three had problems and failed to be rebuilt twice. Suspecting problems I completely reformatted and repartitioned the drive, this time with a single large partition. Having done this I am no longer encountering the error and the router has not crashed in more than 18hrs with the drive attached. This suggests that something in the directory corruption that existed on that partition was crashing the router.
While this portion of the mystery is solved, I am now getting an error when I attempt to connect to the drive from two computers on my network via afp://routerlogin.net. SMB connections still go through fine, but there is something about the AFP connection that is not working right but that might become a separate thread.
Thanks again to all of you who contributed suggestions and guidance!
