Travel router used to copy from SD card to USB stick or similar

Hi,

I am new to these routers and considering if one might suit my needs. I see some of them have both an SD card slot and a USB port. I would like to be able to copy files from an SD card to a device plugged into the USB slot - photos specifically. Presumably the SD card slot is visible as a share of some kind (SAMBA?). Can the USB slot act as a host to share media as well? If so, I could presumably use a smartphone to copy files from SD to USB?

I realise that if the USB device draws much power I would need to provide separate power to it. Could I use a portable SSD with USB y-cable to provide power?

If the above is possible, presumably it would not matter if there was an Internet connection or not?

If anybody has tried this, what sort of transfer speeds are they getting and on which model router?

Thanks in advance, Chris.

Looking at the available routers, the GL-AR750 looks like the right choice for me. It has SD slot and its USB port can be used as a SAMBA share I believe. I will probably not use OpenVPN on it, I just use PIA app directly on my phone/tablet so not much need. What file transfer speed am I going to get from SD to USB? I tend to use Kingston SD cards with an 80MB/s theoretical read speed and will probably use an M2 SSD drive as the target so I don’t think these will be the bottleneck. The SD cards I use are normally 64GB and I swp them out so not all my eggs are in one basket. If one card fails I don’t lose all my photos. The current SSD I have is 256GB which will be big enough.

I read another post that states exFAT support was dropped in firmware 3.010 - for write anyway. I can probably get away with read only on exFAT (the SD card needs to be exFAT to work in the camera I am using). The destination SSD can be NTFS. Any issues with this?

C

Humph, nobody tried this? I have a RavPower RP-WD03 FileHub that does what I want but it is very slow. Wanted something quicker. I can just use a USB hub connected to my phone by a USB OTG adaptor but that is also slow on my Google Pixel 2 XL. Just want something faster.

I haven’t tried your combination, but I can verify that my GL-MIFI model router with the 3.022 firmware does include kmod_fs_exfat and kmod_fs_ntfs, so it should work.

@Bogmonster

Sorry, waiting for my AR750S to arrive (hopefully today).

Then might get a chance to test over the weekend, wife permitting :stuck_out_tongue:

Are you shooting RAW or JPG?

(Do note too that it’s a micro SD/Transflash slot in the AR750 not a full size SD slot )

Hi, I shoot RAW with JPG as well. Most of my cards are micro used in an adaptor so the micro slot should not be a problem although I would have preferred a full size slot. Too easy to drop and lose micro SD cards in the field…

C

OK, didn’t get an answer so I thought I would provide my own findings. I bought an AR300M largely for a different purpose altogether but I put an SD card to USB adaptor in and tried with an exFAT SD card. I was getting a transfer over SAMBA to my Google Pixel 2 XL of about 22Mbps. Not quite as fast as I would like really so I am still interested if the other routers would do better before stumping up cash. I know USB2 is a bit of a bottleneck here so I am not sure if a faster router will actually read the SD card any faster?

For those who are interested, I was getting about 73Mbps up and down from the internet to my Lenovo tablet. That is pretty much maxing out my broadband connection. I was only getting 60 down and 44 up on the Pixel which surprised me as Lenovo is quite old now.

Bogmonster