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Accessing external USB disk attached to my ASUS RT-AC68U router

I have my own cloud storage server using ownCloud for many years now, and love it. It’s like DropBox, only better.

However, even with that, it’s still nice to have a shared storage for my home network. So today I bought a Seatate Ultra Slim USB 3 disk from Costco, with 2TB capacity. It is attached to my router, ASUS RT-AC68U. Here are the steps for:

  • Router set up;
  • Mount a drive on Windows;
  • Mount a drive on Linux;

Router:
1. Go to 192.168.1.1 through your browser;
2. USB Application (left side);
3. Media Services and Servers;
4. Network Place (Samba) Share / Cloud Disk;
5. Enable Share. I also enabled Allow guest login. Leave everything and click “Apply”.

Windows:
Map a drive to \\192.168.1.1\Seagate_Backup_Plus_Drive\Seagate

Linux:
sudo apt install cifs-utils
sudo mkdir /media/routerUSB
Edit /etc/fstab, adding this line:
//192.168.1.1/Seagate_Backup_Plus_Drive/Seagate /media/routerUSB cifs guest 0 0
Run sudo mount -a

Update: I’m now running Manjaro Arch Linux on my home workstation. cifs-utils is installed by default. I created the routerUSB folder under /mnt. In addition, the entry I added to /etc/fstab is a bit different. To get rid of an error similar to “host not found”, I added the vers=1.0 option:
//RT-AC68U-56E8/Seagate /mnt/routerUSB cifs username=user,password=password,vers=1.0 0 0

Enjoy!

Haidong Ji

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10 responses to “Accessing external USB disk attached to my ASUS RT-AC68U router”

  4. Yes, but how is the drive formatted? Not a trivial step. Exfat? FAT32?

  6. ow to choose right file system for your usb disk? Simple, not FAT32 or NTFS because AsusWRT routers using Linux which is not Windows best friend 🙂

    For usb flash drives best choice is EXT2 (All AsusWRT routers)

    For usb hdd Mipsel devices is EXT3 (RT-N16, RT-N66U, RT-AC66U and all other versions: /R /W)

    For usb hdd ARM devices is EXT4 (RT-AC56U, RT-AC68U, RT-AC87U, RT-AC88U, RT-AC3200, RT-AC5300 and all other versions: /P /R /W)

    Warning!!! Formatting the disk will destroy all existing data, please backup your files first, bigger disk capacity – longer time to format! 🙁

  7. I have ASUS RT-AC66U router and Manjaro KDE Plasma v19.
    I have question regarding in /etc/fstab, adding this line:
    //192.168.1.1/Seagate_Backup_Plus_Drive/Seagate
    is this the name given to USB Drive?
    My IP address is: //192.168.66.105 and name given in router for share is asus-hdd and enabled Allow guest login.

    What should be in /etc/fstab
    My /etc/fstab is:
    //192.168.66.105/asus-hdd /mnt/asushdd cifs username=user,password=password,vers=1.0 0 0
    I am getting error:
    mount error(2): No such file or directory
    Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g. man mount.cifs) and kernel log messages (dmesg)

  8. Thank you so much.
    I have been trying to mount two drives attached to my RT-AC86U router for the past week and a half and my head was beginning to spin!
    You have provided the template I needed to accomplish this.

  9. Directions for Linux is great and I’m sure helpful, however, most everyone I know is using Windows 10 specifically. How about gearing this towards Windows 10 and use the Linux instructions as a side note?

  10. One commenter remarked: ‘ not FAT32 or NTFS because AsusWRT routers using Linux ‘ and recommended using EXT2 for external flash drive. Here is a performance test of a 64 GB flash drive on RT-AC68U:

    NTFS write Average (W): 17.61 MB/sec
    EXT2 write Average (W): 8.96 MB/sec

    For read speed it is about the same on both drives.
    Average (R): 72.50 MB/sec

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