Review: The Wireless BitTorrent router
Written by Ernesto on August 11, 2006I heard some stories about the Asus WL-700gE, aka “the BitTorrent router” a couple of months ago. It was announced as the ultimate gadget for torrent freaks, so I decided to buy one as soon as it was available. That was three weeks ago.
After two weeks of extensive testing I think I’m able to write a proper review (of the bt part). Lets start with a general overview of the specs:
The router comes with a setup utility, thus configuring the router is pretty easy. The goal of this article is to review the BitTorrent related functionalities of the router, but I have to say that the router does pretty much everything it promises. To name a few things:
But now the BitTorrent part. The Asus WL-700gE comes with a “download master” utility that supports ftp, http, and BitTorrent downloads. There are two ways to download torrents, you can upload a torrent with the “download master” utility on your pc or you can access the “download master” in your web browser.
The progress of the downloads can be monitored in the transfer panel of the download master. It lists the filename, progress, size, speed and ETA. The web-based download master has a few extra monitoring options (peers!, download/upload).
Download Master
Web Download Master
The transfer monitoring is quite buggy, the speed and filesize update every 10 seconds or so, but the torrents have the strange tendency to stop downloading if you watch the transfer progress for more than a minute. They resume downloading as soon as you minimize the window.
And there are more bugs. About 50% of all the torrents I paused, never resumed after the pause. This means I had to redownload all the data.
The overall speed is ok, and it shouldn’t matter too much, since most people will use it to download torrents overnight.
There is not much to tweak. The only option you have is to set the time the torrent should seed once the download is finished (default is 1 hour). Too bad they didn’t include a ratio seed setting.
Conclusion:
Overall I would say the router performs very well and is worth the money (I paid approximately $300). However, the BitTorrent client is very buggy and limited. It works but it could and should be improved significantly. The router would not yet replace my regular torrent client, but it does the job at night.
pro’s:
con’s
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Oh man this sounds awesome! Even if the bittorent features are buggy everything else sounds great! Too bad i don’t have enough money to get one :(
well i guess if you had installed an alternative firmware like OpenWRT (wich works on most Asus routers) you could have used the original bittorrent client and written your own monitoring page.
the idea is good but i do exactly the same with my WRT54G (60 euros new,35-40 euros on Ebay). bittorrent is running on the router and the files are saved on my hard drive via Samba. I do the monitoring with an ncurses console via SSH.
too bad you can’t hack it to use utorrent, that would be amazing!
@Killingfrost
OpenWRT doesn’t work on this router yet afaik. But sure, you can fabricate someting similar yourself if you have the skills. But the 64mb RAM on the router is nice though.
How many watts does it draw?
Are there any features that aren’t compatible with OS X (specifically a MacBook Pro)?
Is the internal drive 2.5″?
DC Adapter AC Input: 100V~240V(50~60HZ)
DC Output: 12V with max. 3 A Current
Specs on the power supply, so it is not more than 36w plus the power supply loss (2 - 3 watts on this size). I would guess 10% oversize on the power supply so a really rough guess of 35W and that would be with the HD running. It will be less if the HD sleeps.
I did a quick measure, and Dartrunner is right…
30watts peak (restarting router)
15watts “idle”
and Macslut, I have no idea. The hard disk is 3.5″
15 watts idle is pretty nice. I have a Compaq that is some kind of weird laptop-made-into-workstation that is a PIII 500MHz with a 20GB drive (all I have lying around) and 256MB of RAM. It pulls 35 watts and is what I consider my “green” computer (compare to 280 watts for my “good” computer). This little router does all my green machine does, for less watts.
Any idea if I can shove an already formatted drive in there?
And if so… could it be HFS formatted?
Since it’s linux, I know it’s technically possible - but has ASUS been forward thinking enough to include support for it?
@Lee
Replacing the Hard Drive is not a problem
The router recognizes the new drive if you run the firmware restoration tool
However, this will REFORMAT the drive
Anyone know if you can sync your iPod to this? Or if it just shows up as shared directory in iTunes, in which case I would assume you could not sync your iPod to it.
it has only 2 Mb flash so it is probably to tight to fit a linux firmware but anyway some ppl managed it. check http://wiki.openwrt.org/OpenWrtDocs/Hardware/Asus/WL700gE there is a link to a forum thread about this.
*sweet
What version of firmware is installed?
@dsanon
The most recent version…
does anybody know where one can actually _get_ one of these in the U.S.? nobody, and i mean nobody, that i can find on the internet has these in stock. *sob*
Hello there,
This router sounds very interesting. I have been thinking that i shall buy Asus WL-500G Premium, the difference between that and the WL-700gE is the harddrive or?
Important question is how does i work to upload bittorrent with “download master”?
Because for me is more important to be able to shut off the pc while i upload then download.It takes time to upload and get a good ratio after you have been download.
Kjerag
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