Western Digital My Net N900 HD Dual-Band Wireless Router Review

By Ken Brown June 15, 2012

More Testing of the WD My Net N900 Router

Because our initial testing of the WD My Net N900 speeds were so bad, we looked at the situation a little more carefully. In the previous tests we allowed both the My Net N900 and the Netgear WNDR 4500 to automatically choose the channel they wanted to broadcast over. Even though we turned on WMM and QoS we still weren’t connecting to either router at optimal speeds. We decided to manually select the broadcast channel to see if we could optimize our wireless network speeds.

To do this, we did a quick “radio survey” using the inSSIDer tool found over at Metageek. This gave us a quick heads up of how the selected broadcast channel was doing. From there, we went back to Totusofts LAN Speed Test v.2.0.8 to measure speeds between the routers and our remote computer.

Below you will find the results from our picking the “cleanest” channel in our environment.

http://www.legitreviews.com/images/reviews/1957/WD_MyNet_1MB_m.jpg

Test Results: After picking a ‘clean’ channel in the 5Ghz range, we see that there is a speed increase in both the Western Digital and Netgear routers. The Western Digital has a slight advantage in Write speed over the Netgear for ‘smaller’ packets that are 1MB in size.

Test Results:
For larger packets of information, we expected to see the same performance gaps as that of our smaller 1MB test. In reality, the Netgear seems to stretch out a little and overcomes the Western Digital in Write speeds. Overall the two routers are very consistent and to be honest, there is little between them when it comes to overall performance in a optimally chosen environment.

We even did some quick tests with a Dell XPS 15z laptop equipped with an
Intel 6230 AGN dual-band wireless-N Wi-Fi card and obtained similar
results to the ones reported above for both the WD My Net N900 and Netgear WNDR 3500 N900.

Streaming HD Video

We
didnt connect the Western Digital My Net N900 to the Sony PlayStation 3
or Microsoft Xbox 360, but we did conduct some quick testing on the
Netgear WNDR 4500 versus the WD My Net N900 watching high-definition
movies streamed from Network Attached Storage. We used our WD TV Live!
(Gen 2) to look at a number of 720p and 1080p via wireless connection
and I have to say that both the Netgear and Western Digital My Net
played every movie with 720p flawlessly but when it came to playing
1080p multimedia, the My Net N900 had the slight edge. They both
couldnt get through a 5 minute period of Harry Potter: Deathly Hallows
without a freeze, skip, or dropout. I did notice that the WD did a
slightly better job in holding things together. In other words, we
still skipping with the WD router still happened, but it took longer for
the skipping than the Netgear router. (So much for scientific testing!)

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