Average Read speeds in the middle of the pack but still pretty good at almost 68 MB/s. The USB 3.0 Average Write speeds measured in at around 75 MB/s which puts it near the top of all routers we have tested. We wanted to make sure the write speeds would be high enough not to bottleneck the benchmarks of these next generation routers.īenchmark Results: When comparing the Netgear R8500 storage speeds to others in our suite of routers, the Nighthawk X8 doesnt exactly lead the pack, but it does quite well. Those speeds should be well over what this generation routers can support. On our test system we were able to get 300MB/s read and 160MB/s write speeds on the DTHX30/64GB. The Kingston HyperX USB 3.0 Flash drive is rated conservatively at 225MB/s read and 135MB/s write. The folks at Kingston were kind enough to send over a Kingston DataTraveler HyperX 3.0 64GB USB drive ( $60.00 shipped) for our tests. We ran our routers with this test with default ATTO settings of 0.5 KB up through 8192.0 KB transfer sizes with the total length being 256 MB. ATTO measures raw transfer rates for both Read and Write plotting them in a graph that is easy to understand. Of course the question is how good is the performances of these routers when it comes to attached storage.įor our Router Storage test, we used the very popular ATTO Disk Benchmark to measure transfer speeds of our routers USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports. If a person didnt want to spend a lot of money for a stand-alone NAS unit which could cost hundreds of dollars for a 2TB unit, an integrated solution that allows you to add a USB Flash drive for much less might be perfect. One of the major components of these next-generation routers is the ability for them to double as home-ready Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices. In comparison, the Linksys WRT1900AC had an almost 60% jump in power consumption.Netgear R8500: Network Attached Storage Tests What is interesting is that both the ASUS RT-AC3200 and Netgear R8000 had similar power spikes (of around 10%) when running under load as well. Under load, the R8500 uses about 10% more power than when it is at idle. Each router was connected to our P3 International P4400 Kill-A-Watt electric usage monitor and the results are plotted below:īenchmark Results: Under load, the Netgear R8500 uses 21.5 Watts of power making it the most consumptive router we have tested.
We did multiple instances of large packet sizes (5 GB) to keep the processors on each device busy.
The way we measured the power draw at load is that we started multiple instances of LAN Speed Test, our application to test the routers wireless throughput speeds.
#NETGEAR NIGHTHAWK X8 R8500 FULL#
We were curious to see if there were any power differences between these networking devices at idle and when they are under full load. In the above chart we have examined how each of these devices do when they are idle, but for power users who are using Bittorrent, playing online games, or who have busy small office, their routers are almost always in constant use. All three of these routers are Tri-Band routers with the only difference being in the Active Antennas the Nighthawk X8 has introduced.įor the most part, when people start using these routers into their network, they really dont think about the power usage. We measured the Nighthawk X8 at 56% higher than its cousin the Netgear R8000 and ASUS RT-AC3200 router. We then measured the power draw from each router at the wall with our P3 International P4400 Kill-A-Watt electric usage monitor.īenchmark Results: It is quite apparent that the Netgear Nighthawk X8 AC5300 is very power hungry under idle conditions. To measure idle usage, we reset each wireless router to the default settings and plugged them with no devices connected to them. Power consumption by your homes electronic devices continues to be a very important issue so we have made an attempt to present some simple power consumption tests on the various routers that we had.