Download the app to your smart phone, added a USB hard drive for network storage.

I tried several different USB cords and tried swapping the hard drives, putting the one I had in port 2 into port 1 and vice-versa but it made no difference

good!Also love the option to connect a 3 Tb hard drive to the router USB port to access my saved files remotely.

I have one from a hard drive NAS that I have

But it's hard to get past all the fighting I had to do with getting it to recognize the hard drives and all the mysteriously dropped connections with my wife's work laptop, especially for a router this expensive

If you haven't read the item description I should probably mention that this router has two USB 3 ports that let you plug in external hard drives and then share those files across all devices on your network

The one setting that wasn't intuitive was the page for configuring the external hard drives I had plugged into it

I also like that the same external hard drive that I keep my media on for the Plex Server is the same external hard drive I use for their cloud ready share

(you don't have to use this software to share files).There is a list on the Netgear website that lists specific models of supported hard drives, and the two identical drives I had were on the list (which I specifically checked before purchasing this router)

After three months of use I had to fight with this thing several times to get it to recognize my hard drives

Then there was a deal on an 8TB external hard drive which I decided to get even though it wasn't on Netgear's list ()

I physically rebooted it and once it was back up the light for external hard drive 1 was

We also had the external hard drive issues again

Once I got that set up it worked well, except for when the router stopped recognizing the hard drives

Turn on the router, unplug the hard drive power, plug in the USB cord, plug in the power... maybe

It's best feature was the ability to plug a hard drive into of of the provided USB inputs and use it as a media server for the home network

Somewhere in the "ready Share" process 2 of my external hard drives were corrupted and now can't be read.

Once the Internet came back on we were able to stream videos from the hard drive just fine

The only problem is that when using my Mac, it's very inconsistent with my hard drive that is connected with it

While you can attach a hard drive or SSD to the USB ports, it makes for a poor NAS

past couple weeks we experienced local streaming issues twice wherein video streamed from the external hard drive connected to the router would start to stutter, then buffer, then stop

If your looking for a fast router this is great but attaching a hard drive for cloud media, it's going to be a hassle.

but we've watched several videos that were on that hard drive and I am able to copy files on and off it.

If I write to the hard drive using one client, the second client is denied access until the first releases access

Once our second hard drive lost the connection so I unplugged and re-plugged in the USB

We waited over an hour to see if external hard drive 2 would show up but it never did

And what's really frustrating is that often times when the first port would light up I'd plug the second hard drive in and the first one would go away and the second one wouldn't light up either

It has destroyed a portable hard drive of mine, and when I plug in the new one, it disables my wi-fi.

Allows you to connect an external hard drive by USB 3 and most importantly it literally doubled my download speeds compared to the router my cable company gave me!

It has destroyed a portable hard drive of mine, and when I plug in the new one, it disables my wi-fi.

I have a WD 4TB USB 3 hard drive connected

Works good, just trying to figure out how to recognise my hard drive storage using the usb connection on Nighthawk

Days later both hard drives stopped being recognized and this time I had to fight to get it to recognize them just like I mentioned in my original review

This is actually the primary reason why I chose this router, because I already had a couple external hard drives and didn't want to shell out money for a real NAS (network attached storage) plus internal hard drives

There are mounting holes which I used to hang it on the wall which is nice to save space for other stuff on the shelf, like the external hard drives

I use the USB to run a backup hard drive for our family PC as well.

Prior to this I would not have recommended this router to anyone who specifically wanted to use the USB ports for external hard drives, but now I'd say I guess it depends on the hard drive and obviously Netgear's list is not the best one to go by

It took me a bit to figure out how to do port-forwarding on the unit, as opposed to the D-Link (which severely limited how many ports you could forward.

This will need to lie flat, however, as I

Ok not as strong as I imagine