Unlike several of the other routers we tested, D-Link provides no mechanism for forcing the router to channel-bond. When I initially set up the router, it detected the presence of at least one other 2.4GHz wireless network operating in the vicinity and refused to turn on channel bonding on its own. This behavior wasn't unusual--most of the other 802.11ac routers refused to engage in channel bonding on the 2.4GHz frequency band, as well--but the D-Link's performance on this band was pitiful both when the client was in my kitchen test location and when it was at its farthest distance from the router (75 feet, with four insulated walls in between). As you can see in the charts below, the DIR-685L placed last in both locations.

I have no complaints about the DIR-685L's hardwired ethernet performance. It was just as fast as the quickest routers in the roundup.

To evaluate the DIR-685L's performance as a network-attached storage device, I connected a 500GB Western Digital USB drive to one of the router's USB ports. I used a stopwatch to time how long it took the unit to copy a few files from a PC to the drive over the network (a write test), and then I copied a few files from the USB drive to the networked PC over the network (a read test). The PC was hardwired to the network.

I created a large-file test by ripping a DVD (Quentin Tarantino's From Dusk to Dawn) to the PC's hard drive. Copying this 4.29GB file from the PC to the portable hard drive took the router more than 20 minutes to accomplish. As bad as that sounds, it was 10 minutes faster than the Belkin AC 1200 DB (both routers scores are off the chart, below); and Buffalo's WZR-D1800H doesn't support NTFS-formatted drives, so I couldn't benchmark it at all.

The DIR-685L's read performance with this single large file was far less dismal, but it wasn't anything to boast about, either. The router took last place behind the other four 802.11ac routers, and it was slower than the Asus RT-N66U reference router, too.