Rating: 
Summary: Does not work with Airport Extreme - Tech support a joke
Review: Any machines accessing over an airport extreme card will have very poor access speeds and lots of dropped packets (over 50%) unless you disable the "G" protocol on the router and run it in 8011.b mode only. Netgear "support" involves wading through a 5-layer menu, sitting on hold, then talking to a thickly accented fellow from some foreign shore whose job is to say "no" just like the Dana Carvey commercials for Capital One.
When I asked to talk to someone knowledgeable on the product I was told that is "premium" support which costs $$ even in the first 90 days.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent apart for the slow disk access speed
Review: Been running this router for about 9 months now and it works very well. Using the latest firmware the wireless connection is always 100% throughout the house and now there's no firewall on my computer (relying on the router's firewall) web access seems much faster too.
I've only got a couple of gripes;
1) You couldn't forward both TCP and UDP on the same port number, although this has finally been fixed with the latest firmware ;o)
2) I'm using a Maxtor One Touch 300GB USB drive attached to the router, although this router claims USB2 the transfer rate I get when copying to and from the drive is only about ~10 Mbps. This should be at least 50 Mbps on a 100baseT network? I get about 70 Mbps when transferring files to and from my XBox. The drive is lightning fast when it's connected directly to the computer.
A NOTE TO PREVIOUS REVIEWERS
I don't know if it's been a firmware update since you reviewed your unit but you were complaining about the FAT32 support and having max 32GB partitions? I have a single 300GB partition on my drive and it works fine. And the max 4GB file limit, come on, any decent backup software should be able to split the backup into <4GB chunks :o/
Rating:
Summary: Do not even think about it
Review: Being a networking and computer savvy user for more than a decade, I have installed and used much more complex products. This Netgear router was the worst product I have ever purchased. It took my a couple of hours to setup and get working. The remote USB drive access does not work. I repeat, does not work as portrayed. USB drive access is very slow. I repeat, very slow. Connections keep dropping in a home environment. I repeat, keep dropping in a home environment.
Just wait and buy a simpler router for now.
Rating:
Summary: A very poor product!
Review: Hello - I have been a fan of Netgear products for many years. I feel, unfortunately, that their products are being released with more and more bugs. This is by far the worst I've ever owned.I got an ill feeling when I opened the box, and the first thing that comes out is a bright yellow sheet of paper saying to be sure to check their website for any bug fixes before using the wireless capabilities. Hmmmm.... Then I hooked it up and ran security scans from GRC.com. The router fails - it has ports 13 and 21 WIDE OPEN for all the world to see. In addition, the default is to respond to all pings from the internet. Then I upgraded the firmware as advised and tried the wireless. First, there is no WPA on this router yet. They claim it will come later. Then it would not reliably connect with my 108mbps Netgear wireless card even though the boxes said it would. It would fail authentication for about 2 minutes then all of a sudden would establish the connection. And the last straw was the error messages. They are in poor English. For example, when my wireless connections got dropped and I tried to log back on, the router displayed this message: USER ALREADY LOGINED ON. Logined on? What the heck is that? So it went back to the store. I'll stick with my old Netgear products for now until they all die.
Rating:
Summary: Save yours time + efforts
Review: I bought this product and already spend more than 2 weeks to get it working to no avail. I returned the product. Problems:
1) Wireless connection is too poor, connection drops, speed fluctuates(my laptop uses wirelessG) too often.
2) USB drive access is excellent from wired PC, too poor from wireless PC. On average it takes 4-5minutes to transfer a 1MB file from laptop to USB drive. My laptop has in-built Broadcom wireless card. Telephonic service people are "WORTHLESS". I went through level 1 -> 2-> 3 technical support, they were just clueless and kept babbling the same basic stuff.
3) Their purpoted FTP access doesn't work. After many tries, the Level 2 support technician told me that the router doesn't have an option to open up service port 20, required for FTP access. And hence I cannot make an FTP connection from outside.
Conclusion: If you have enough spare time, please go ahead, else please take advantage of my experiences and do yourself a great favour by not purchasing this router-or crap should I say!
Rating:
Summary: Good features but would consistently drop PPPoE connection
Review: I bought this router to replace my D-Link DI-614+ for 802.11g support AND USB drive support (my main reason for the upgrade). However, there's a bug in their firmware that cause my SBC Yahoo DSL connection to drop after several hours of use/non-use and it wouldn't reconnect until I manually reconnect or reboot the router. My D-Link router works reliably and would reconnect if the connection is dropped. I have tried all firmware versions including the latest beta v1.3.0.0 with different MTU settings but no luck. Other modes (DHCP, static IP) seem to work fine. I have e-mailed Netgear tech support but they are not very helpful - they sent me the latest beta firmware version which I have already tried! I would stay away from this product unless you really want the integrated USB drive support and can deal with PPPoE disconnects.
Rating:
Summary: Very Unstable
Review: I bought this with the hope that i could store all my pictures and music in one central place on the network. But my drive is NTFS, which this device only supports read only access, so i couldn't add any new files through the network. I was willing to live with that with the hope that at some point a firmware revision would solve that problem. I had to return it because it wouldn't keep a wireless connection to any of my devices for a consistant period of time. Some of these devices had compatible Netgear SuperG cards and some didn't. I was absolutely maddening to watch the little pop up box in the system tray lose, then find, then lose my connection. Maybe if I was new to this stuff this might not have bothered me so much, but I replaced an old Linksys 802.11b wireless router that had just worked for years without so much as a hiccup. I am very disappointed in this product and wouldn't recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: Storage is not simple and support for it was poor
Review: I tried to plug in 3 drive types for external storage. This was to be a great way to have a single location for all my computers on the network. Unfortunately this USB drive does not work as promised. I used a USB drive formatted FAT32, another formatted NTFS, and finally a flash drive. None of them would work with the unit. The instructions were not working and I am faily proficient with networking. I emailed their help area and they asked me questions like "is your drive plugged in?". 10 emails later I could not get anyone who would have a conversation with me. I am still not able to use this router and decided to go out and buy a NAS drive that will allow me to do the same basic thing. I am returning this router for the less expensive model and plugging the NAS drive into a LAN port and getting the same basic functions.
Rating:
Summary: When did the wheels come off at Netgear?
Review: I've been a Netgear fan for quite some time.
This device sounds like a dream but has been a total nightmare, even with the latest firmware from Netgear's website:
1) Wireless connection flat out doesn't work for me. Both the laptop card and previous wireless router where Netgear branded product and worked great together (802.11b).
2) USB drive connection is unstable. After formatting the drive with FAT32 and lots of little (32GB) partitions, I copied everything to the drive and connected it to router. The router reports the shares properly and reports correct directory structure but files are only visible intermittently via Windows networking. When files are copied FROM the device - the copies are truncated/corrupt. THIS COULD BE A AN 'INCOMPATIBLE' USB ENCLOSURE PROBLEM. However, I've had no similar issues when connecting the enclosure directly to USB port on my computer.
3) FTP to USB shares flat out didn't work for me. FTP program sees the FTP server but username/password is never successfully authenticated.
4) Web administration interface is buggy: after successfully connecting to the internet via a wired port on the router, web administration attached device list does NOT show my computer as being attached.
5) Netgear support forums website unreachable. The cherry on the cake of my WGT634U experience? The links to Netgear's support forum have been unreachable for the past few days. Perhaps they are overloaded with traffic due to complaints and questions about this unbelievably poor product.
What the HECK has happened at Netgear that they would let a product like this out the door?!?!
Rating:
Summary: A Unique Wireless Router-Server
Review: I've had several wireless routers, and this one sets up and works as well or better than any, with excellent range, compatibility, and versatile security features. The unique server feature allows a compatible storage device attached via the router's USB port to act as a media/file server accessible via FTP from the web - that's why port 21 is open. It's nice to be able to download/upload files from anywhere you have web access. Yes, there are some rough edges to the software, but nothing insurmountable.
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