When you’re in the market for a new router, you’ll probably want to prioritize some features over others. For speed freaks who want ultra-fast Internet speeds without buying dedicated access points for wireless functionality, you’ll want to focus on routers that support them. Wi-Fi 7 (or at least its 6E counterpart). Alternatively, if you value privacy above all else, you can look into routers that work with VPNs.
So even if it’s not your top priority when comparing models, your home router still has some pretty useful features. Take, for example, the USB port built into certain mid-range and high-end routers. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say it can replace a dedicated storage server, it’s still a handy addition to your router for light file sharing tasks, temporary print servers, and regular backups.
A USB port on your router can provide simple file sharing functionality
It’s also pretty easy to set up on most router interfaces
Let’s say you have a fairly simple setup where you frequently need to transfer files between your devices on a daily basis. As long as you don’t need very high speeds or high security for your file sharing tasks, you can simply pop a regular flash drive into your router’s USB port and enable SMB shares to create a simple environment for transferring files between devices connected to your home network.
I’ve used such a setup in the past for simple file transfers between a MacBook, an Android tablet, and a Windows PC, and while the transfer speeds weren’t groundbreaking by any means, the router-powered flash drive was adequate for sub-1GB file transfers. It also worked great for playing photos, music playlists, and lightweight 1080p video files on media servers. But that was the cutoff point for my router-based file sharing and media playback workloads, as a dedicated NAS is better for more demanding tasks.
But I wouldn’t recommend it as a replacement for NAS-heavy workloads
You will run into performance and security issues
Before I talk about other uses for the USB port, let me make this clear: it’s not a good idea to rely on it for memory-centric tasks. Even if it supports USB 3.0 speeds, the processor inside the router will be too weak to provide incredibly fast transfer speeds. Sure, you could technically plug an external SSD into it, but you’d have to contend with extreme speeds, leaving flash drives the only usable storage device for this temporary setup. As for hard drives, I ran into a reliability issue when trying to connect an external HDD to the router as an experiment. The hard drive disconnects every once in a while because my router can’t give it enough juice.
Of course, some high-end routers may not have these issues, but at this point, you’re better off. cheap NAS anyway. Or even with your own construction OpenMediaVault with recycled hardware, unless you want to spend hundreds of dollars just to get 4GB of RAM in your budget chassis.
You can also use it to backup your network settings
Or even turn it into a temporary print server
In addition to sharing small files, the USB port on your router can be really handy for creating backup copies of your network settings. I’m often working on wild experiments with DMZ, VLAN, and (worst of all) DNS settings in my home lab, so it’s not uncommon to accidentally disconnect my LAN from the Internet by tweaking the wrong options in my router’s web interface. Thanks to the backup feature, I saved my hard settings to a USB drive, so I can always go back to a safe installation after a failed test.
But if you have an inexpensive USB printer that doesn’t support wireless connectivity, you can connect it to your router and use the print server functionality to allow other devices on your network to access it. This is going to sound like a wild use case, but hear me out for a second. If you are trying to build a network monitoring station using multiple ESP32 boards, you may run out of power sockets. Well, the USB port on your router might not have enough juice for bulky hard drives, but it should be more than enough to run the ESP32 without power supply issues.
