I would like to add external hard drive to my RAX80 AX8 8-Stream Wifi Router that could store photos, movies, video games etc - and be accessible by PCs, PS4, Xbox, TVs and other devices. Looking at >20TB capacity. Looking for recommendations on best solution.
At 20TB+, you really should be focusing on getting a 4 bay NAS if possible. While they can be pricey in the $200 range without any drives, for larger amounts of data, they are worth it in terms fo data redundancy and failure support.
On the other hand, if the router attached storage will effectively be
3rd local copy of your data, then the cheapest option is to possibly use a dual slot external hard drive dock. They will have no data redundancy and the drives will show up as 2 separate network shares, where you can have a 10TB hard drive in each slot, but that can work.
PS, since routers are more limited in resources. A decent 4 bay NAS will have around 4GB of RAM and multiple CPU cores dedicated to just the storage functions rather than a router typically giving the storage a single core so that its use doess not impact the WAN and WiFi performance. Services like DLNA on a router if you have a large library with 20TB worth of bulk media, images, and music, will likely not provide snappy DLNA performance, and you will likely end up disabling it and relying on SMB browsing from the client devices, rather than relying on DLNA to index everything.
I have not had a chance to use the RAX80 but I know that on older routers, DLNA does not scale well if you do something like load a massive number of media files and try to have it index it all and expect fast updating.
On the other hand, if the router attached storage will effectively be
3rd local copy of your data, then the cheapest option is to possibly use a dual slot external hard drive dock. They will have no data redundancy and the drives will show up as 2 separate network shares, where you can have a 10TB hard drive in each slot, but that can work.
This does not mention the technology involved. If the idea is to use USB, forget it.
The largest drive that anyone has got to work is 6 TB, but most people report that 4 TB is the biggest. That is certainly the limit on the compatibility page:
A dock will not work if it requires special software, but the supermajority are plug and play. I have been using docks since the Netgear R6300, though the largest drive I have personally used, is an 8TB wd red in a dock connected to the R7800, and RAX50 (larger than 8TB does get quite expensive).
For dual drive docks, if not in a clone mode, they effectively act simply as an internal USB hub, where the device sees it as basically 2 separate external hard drives. The main issue though is that DLNA services in most routers struggle with large media libraries.
Many compatibility issues come from scenarios when someone is using USB accessories that are entirely powered from the USB port.
