Unless you rip a lot of movies from DVD or Blu-ray discs, you'll rarely move a single large file to a hard drive attached to your router. A more common task is to move batches of small files back and forth across your network. To evaluate each router's performance in this scenario, I created a single folder containing 595MB of small files (subfolders containing music, graphics, photos, documents, spreadsheets, and so on).

D-Link's DIR-685L write performance with this batch of small files was (relatively to the other routers) only slightly better than its large-file performance: The router required a full 3 minutes to transfer the files from a host PC to the USB hard drive attached to it. As you can see in the chart below, that meant a next-to-last finish in this category--though the Belkin's last-place finish here was positively abysmal.

The DIR-685L didn't improve its standing when retrieving those small files from the attached hard drive, finishing next to last again.

The D-Link DIR-865L lacks many of the advanced features its competitors offer, and it isn't as fast as the best of them. Those factors make it difficult to justify the D-Link's price tag of $200, which is the same as for the Asus RT-AC66U and the Netgear R6300. Though I do like the MyDlink cloud services and the ability to retrieve files from a network-attached storage device over the Internet, D-Link needs to improve the router's firmware significantly before I can recommend that anyone buy it.