Sunday, January 29, 2017
Slept in. Brunch at home with Patrick: blackberry pancakes. Lots of research to select and buy a new router so that I don't have to pay Sonic $10 a month for the gigabit router they installed when our gigabit fiber was installed last year in February. I had meant to do this all along but was just lazy in doing this work. I had started at The Wirecutter, but wasn't sure if I wanted their pick, the TP-Link Archer C7 ($87), or their upgrade pick, the Netgear R6400 ($107). As a long-term strategy, I want to move long-term or archival data storage off of drives that are built into computers and onto drives that are connected externally or to the network. That way when buying a new computer, we need only enough storage for the OS and apps and some room for the OS and apps to grow over, say, four or five years. This way we don't need to pay Apple a markup premium for extra storage inside the computer, and we can move those dollars to the Apple markup premium for RAM, which we can no longer control by buying third-party RAM. However, some external USB drives won't work with these routers. Netgear publishes a list of drives known to work, but the listed devices specify item ID numbers that were popular several years ago, some of which are now either hard to find or no longer available. Since there's an explicit list of mostly or all older devices, I can't be certain that a newer rev of the same-named drive will work. TP-Link doesn't publish a list at all. Both seem to indicate that if the drive has an external power input it should or must be used. This potential drive incompatibility is perhaps unavoidable given the number of devices on the market. Consequently, in trying to work around this by looking at storage connected via ethernet instead of USB, I spent some time looking at NAS, but NAS is overkill for our needs. We don't need media streaming to anywhere, RAID, more than 3 or 4 TB, or other features typical in NAS. Simpler ethernet-connecting hard drives seemed unpopular and unreliable. For a while I considered the Netgear Nighthawk X4 because it had two USB 3.0 ports and one eSATA port, but eSATA external hard drives seemed unpopular and with poor reviews. Essentially all consumer-focused external storage is currently USB 3.0, with USB-C on the horizon. The performance benefits of the X4 over the R6400 were enticing, but we still own two- and four-year-old smartphones and computers, so we probably would not benefit from an X4 performance-wise for at least another year. So back to choosing between the C7 and R6400. In looking closer at the features of the R6400 that were not available in the C7, the iTunes streaming seemed to be of benefit only if you have AirPlay devices, and we do not, nor do we intend to buy them. OpenVPN seems a nice feature, except it doesn't work with iPhones (or Android phones, for that matter). The R6400 claims to support Time Machine backups, but The Wirecutter article and one commenter seem to support that Time Machine backups indeed do not work with the R6400. I have no use for ReadyShare Vault since I already have three methods of backup. The Wirecutter said that one advantage of the R6400 over the C7 in hardware revision 2 was that it had an easier web user interface, but the C7 is now in hardware revision 4, and the rev 4 user manual is significantly improved over that of the rev 2, and the screenshots of the web user interface also seem significantly improved over rev 2. So that leaves the R6400 with only one advantage for $20 more: OpenVPN for only laptop and desktop computers, which I feel is not worth it. Patrick will never use it, and if I feel I need to, I can use my work VPN. We almost never need to access files remotely, and for the handful we do we can put them in Google Drive or Dropbox. I spent a lot of time investigating MU-MIMO and 802.11ad. We can't benefit from 802.11ad because all our devices will not have line of sight to the router's location. MU-MIMO I'm sure will be beneficial to us at some point in the future, but not now with our older devices. No sense in spending this money now, especially when MU-MIMO routers are two or more times the cost of the Archer C7. So I decided to buy the TP-Link Archer C7. The USB drive that holds our local Crashplan backups is a WD My Passport. If it works in the C7, fine. If not, I'll keep it attached to my computer and Patrick's computer can access it through AFP as happens now (This connection frequently fails, but a simple manual reconnection restores it every time.) I had planned to keep our fourth-generation Time Capsule for Time Machine backups until it died, but now I'm thinking that when it dies I'll try to borrow someone's hair dryer and replace the drive myself instead of trying to choose another USB drive that will be compatible with the C7 which might or might not work. If I find that the WD My Passport works in the C7, then I might buy another for that long-term, archival storage option and plug it into the C7's second USB port. Since these data won't be backed up to Time Machine, I'll back them up to CrashPlan Central. Nap. Snack: flax seed tortilla chips. Dinner at home with Patrick: Green Chef five-spice pork with coconut-ginger quinoa, green beans, corn and endive; ginger ale Zevia; we also opened Cindy's red wine gift from December. Time Machine backup reset for my iMac continues; about 75% complete. The "hours remaining" estimate is such a joke.