I think there is no future for WR1043ND, its design is too old now...

Further more, TP-Link has proven with all their models, they are not capable to develop a firmware managing properly the USB ports...

Hi guys,

I also have a 3TB raid5 USB storage disk (4x1TB disks) and I have the same problems.
My disk is formatted as EXT4. Now it is attached to my raspberry pi (a small linux computer (and it works that way)) but I would like it to be connected to the router.

Is there a chance that this could work if I flash the router with openWRT firmware?

Thanks in advance! I hope we can fix this issue..

It's now june 2013.
I have upgraded my router TL-WR1043ND V1.
The firmware is now: 3.13.13 Build 130428 Rel.58290n.

But still the router does not recognise my 3 TB USB-drive.
What is at this moment the maximum size of drive, which is working well with the router.

I have the same problem using a 2 TB disk.
The disk worked with DD-WRT on the router, but with the TP-Link firmware the router doesn't see the disk

Problem solved. It seems the disk was formatted wrongly. DD-WRT supports unix formatting. recreating the volume on a windows pc solved my problem.
Now ftp performance seems to be slow.

Hi, i have the same problem: a3tb storage. I tried partition it in a lot of sizes, but the max size recognized was only one 1,5tb or 2x 500gb. In this last case, I partitioned my storage in 5, each one with 500gb, but the router recognized only 2. I thing that it's a hardware limitation, and I will need search for another router, but another brand! A update will be the solution? I don't know, but I know that Tp-link leave us alone when we need.

I cannot connect my 4TB external hard drive to my TP link router WR1043ND v1 firmware 3.13.13 Build 130428 Rel.58290n
So I send the drive back to the supplier.
Which type/brand/max size of external hard drive works well?

Any help from TP LINK would be much appreciated !!!!!!

Okay guys. After 6 hours of googling and dancing with bears I found the solution but first let me describe what exactly wrong with this router.
By default your external hard drive formatted in NTFS and as you know the router's OS is linux and it uses some sort of unofficial ntfs driver to read data from a such disks. So the version of this ntfs driver does not support disks with size more than 2 TB. Tada..
That's it. Simple, sin't it?
What can I do with this?
We can't fix this issue in original firmware. So if you really want to use your 3Tb and more HDD then you have to install third party firmware to your router. There is a little FAQ about what will happen if you whant to fix this issue by this way:
May I use support by warranty after this actions? No, if you flash your router's firmware then no one will help you especially from the TP-LINK.
Is it safely? No. You can easily transform your router into the brick. But as for me that wasn't an argument because I bought this router only to use USB sharing functionality.
Is it easy? Again, no. You have to know and understand some core linux and router firmware futures to make this thing happen.
Are you sure that you can handle with it? Then let me describe what have I done to fix this. But anyway before you start to execute following actions please read them carefully and if you don't know how to implement that then don't do that.
1. If you're windows user then you have to install some 3d party tool to connect to router via SSH protocol. I was using PUTTY tool: https://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/latest/x86/putty-0.67-installer.msi
2. Watch this and install openwrt firmware on your router with luci web interface https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LL185QYnPg4
3. PUTTY, connect to 192.168.1.1 enter your created password (if you did that) and write following commands:
[CODE] opkg update
opkg install [B]kmod-usb-storage block-mount kmod-fs-ext4 kmod-fs-hfs kmod-fs-hfsplus kmod-fs-msdos kmod-fs-ntfs kmod-fs-reiserfs kmod-fs-vfat kmod-nls-cp437 kmod-nls-iso8859-1 samba36-server luci-app-samba ntfs-3g[/B][/CODE]
You can check what every command means by using google.

4. Plug your USB HDD to router.
5. Wait for a 5 second and then enter to same putty window:
[CODE]mkdir /mnt/flash
ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /dev/flash[/CODE]
6. Enter 192.168.1.1 in browser and login to luci router web interface. Then go to System->Mount Points. There you have to see something like:




7. Go to Services->Network Shares and implement the following actions:




8. Press WinKey+R, enter there \\OPENWRT then press enter. Open ExternalHDD folder and start to using it.

That's it.

Ah, yes. You can read https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/writable_ntfs for more options.