Review on NETGEAR Centria Gigabit Wireless WNDR4700 by Paul Bijeaux

Looks cool and I like the fact that it can hold an internal hard drive and Linux file systems, but the router's performance just isn't great. File bandwidth to or from the internal or external drive seems to be limited to around 3 Mbit/s and then the router is in a good mood. It can inexplicably falter when there are no disagreements. From time to time I have similar problems with WAN. He just chokes. I'm also having some issues with the media server. The selection list contains audio tracks marked with "Unknown". However, when you click it, the album and track are clearly labeled - ALL my audio media is labeled id3v2, so it's not a compatibility issue. About half of my video files show up as "Unknown". The media server should use the filename as the title - it certainly doesn't read tags in MP4 or MKV files. From time to time the media server just goes to lunch - without adding or removing content, it just decides to rebuild the database. BTW, if you have an external drive, it insists on using it for cache, which slows things down a bit when you select "All Music". I have internal/external drives formatted as ext3 and ext2 respectively. If you don't know what that means, you probably shouldn't buy this router. If you're using NTFS for filesystems, I'm pretty sure you have to keep rebuilding the cache drive, which is probably why they put it on an external drive. Netgear has made it almost impossible to report firmware issues and CS (believed to be from Mumbai) is terrible. My newest Netgear router.