I'm not sure where to see the hardware version number is but I got this router 45 days ago from Amazon. Whenever I plug in a portable hard drive and it is idle, devices on 2.4 GHz act a little wonky but work fine (daily random disconnecting a couple of devices but they'll reconnect a few hours later, annoying but it's usually just smart lights). If the hard drive is spinning, it causes much more devices to start dropping. I thought this might be because it's portable and taking power away from the router somehow so I bought a powered hub. This hub caused more issues, completely killing the 2.4 GHz network (the name would show up but you weren't able to connect as it would throw an unknown error. No devices could connect at all so it would show 0 devices on 2.4 in the Tether app until I disconnected the hub).

Before this I had an Archer C4000 that also had issues when ever the drive would spin up. It would knock devices off all three bands. I bought the AX router as we've been buying newer devices that have AX MU-MIMO antennaes and also have a lot of smart devices (The C4000 seemed to start knocking devices off at 60 devices) but it seems it might have similar issues (even with nothing plugged into USB, some 2.4 GHz devices get knocked for a few hours every few days) and unfortunately now I'm outside the return period (would rather not have spent $300 for a small speed boost for a handful of devices while having the same issues and giving up a 5 GHz band)

I was wondering if anybody had similar issues and found a solution