D-Link DIR-645 review

For more advanced settings you’ll need the router’s web interface. This is clearly laid-out with main menus along the top and sub-menus on the left. It’s not as pretty as the interface on Cisco’s X3000 or the third-party DD-WRT firmware, but it’s easy to find the various options such as port forwarding and QoS and the options are clear and well explained.

The DIR-645 also has a USB port on the rear, which you can use to share media files from a USB flash drive or hard disk. The router can act either as an iTunes server or in DLNA mode, which lets you share music, videos and pictures with DLNA players such as Windows Media Player or with DLNA-compatible devices such as TVs and phones. We had no problems sharing media files from a flash drive or hard disk formatted as NTFS or FAT32 – in stark contrast to the Buffalo WZR-HP-G450H’s media sharing, which we couldn’t get to work at all.

You can also share an entire USB flash drive or hard disk over the network, just as if it’s a network-attached storage (NAS) device. To do this you’ll need to install D-Link’s SharePort Plus software on each computer you want to use to access the disk – your network drive shows up in the software, and you just have to double-click on it to open it in Windows Explorer. It’s also meant to let you share a USB printer on your network, but, while the software could detect our Lexmark Interpret S405 printer, we had a BSOD crash when we tried to connect to it.

D-Link’s DIR-645 is a hugely impressive router, and the fastest router we’ve seen when transferring files to a Centrino 2 laptop. D-Link’s own 802.11n dongle is disappointing, but when we paired the router with an inexpensive Dynamode model we saw huge speeds again. It’s not quite as quick as the Buffalo WZR-HP-G450H overall, but has a better interface and its USB storage functions work beautifully. It’s a great buy.