Failed to Mount the Western Digital 8TB Elements Desktop USB 3.0 Hard Drive onto the ASUS RT-AC3100 Router
 

Could not mount the WD 8TB Elements Desktop USB Hard Drive (formatted as EXT4) onto the ASUS RT-AC3100 router. The WD Elements USB HD would mount when formatted to NTFS. Since I did not want to use NTFS, the drive has been returned. So the issue is "solved" in a sense.

The main reason for posting is to make others aware of this issue and to vent concerning the lack of support for Linux EXT4. Both the ASUS and WD websites simply focus on Windows and the MAC operating systems.

My speculation as to why the WD Elements hard drive failed to mount on the router, is that the router's firmware can't recognize the WD Elements when formatted as EXT4. The hard drive (When formatted as EXT4) was successfully mounted onto a LINUX desktop computer's USB port. So it does work as expected when connected directly to a LINUX PC.

Also disturbing, attempting to mount the WD Elements actually "broke" the Asus router. I don't know why. Anyway, to get the Asus router working again, had perform a factory reset.

can the Asus router handle drives larger than 2TB? maybe it would get I/O errors when trying to access sectors past the 2TB or 4TB line. maybe NTFS can be mounted only accessing sectors down low. i do know the Linux ext4 logic checks all superblocks and there is at least one half-way to the end. mounting ext4 would fail if any kernel logic or firmware logic is limited to 31 or 32 bits for sector numbers no matter what the API pretends to support.

what does the Asus router run? i don't know anything about it.

Good questions. I spent some time, yesterday, re-reading the router manual. It referred me to: file system support webpage. According to those specifications the maximum file size supported by the ASUS RT-AC3100 router is 4TB. Also supports EXT4. I can't tell if the file support webpage is current or not. The manual carries a 2015 publication date. An obvious conclusion, need to investigate a routers specifications before buying.


My 2TB USB 3.0 WD MyPassport formatted with EXT4 does work with the router.

Considering the apparent router limitations, an alternate backup strategy would be to continue to use the 2TB WD MyPassport as the primary backup drive and to then periodically transfer the backups to a USB drive directly attached to a desktop PC.

I might have tried to partition it to 2 then maybe lvm it if router supports. ?? Dunno, would be worth trying maybe?

I'd think there would be a newer firmware for that.

One might be able to run a different version like Merlin or other.

It should be a 64 bit cpu so the firmware in theory ought to support this drive.

Thanks.