Can anyone help with my router problem please?

BarGin

I have O2 broadband and have been using their Wireless Box II.

I have just bought a TP-Link TL-WR1043ND router to speed up my wired network to gigabit and also to give me basic NAS functionality as it has a usb port for attached storage device.

So basically I want to use the O2 router just as a modem and my new router to manage the network. Can anyone give me any tips on how to make this work please? The problem seems to be to do with DHCP but frankly I'm lost.

Any help much appreciated.

BarGin

I got it working with a bit more Googling but I was surprised to find that although I can transfer large files quickly between computers now access to and from the usb attached hard drive is very slow by comparison.

Between computers I am getting transfer rates of approx. 30MB/sec but to and from the external hard drive attached directly to the router I'm only getting read speeds of 4MB/sec and write speeds of approx 2MB/sec which is very disappointing.

Psychofly

Sounds like the USB port on the router is probably only USB v1 which has a much slower speed than USB v2. The BT Home Hub was like this too, at least it was a couple of years ago when I had one. Not much you can do about it unfortunately unless you have a PC that's near enough always on then you could attach the external hdd to that, it's most likely to be USB v2.
It's not an ideal setup unless, like me, you have a PC that's never switched off sitting somewhere. The only other option really is a NAS drive (network attached storage) which is basically an external hard drive that connects directly to your network like a PC would and doesn't use USB but these aren't the cheapest. There's probably some routers out there that have USB v2 built in but again it's going to cost money.