Anybody have any opinions or other ideas?

[crit]

Hi there
After one of our laptops broke down my parents have decided that they want to replace it with an iMac. I have also been looking to replace my laptop with self built rig.
Now our router also needs an upgrade and here lies the problem. I was looking at an asus rt-n66u as it seems to be a very good router. I then also found out that I could attach our old external hdd to it to have a shared network drive. Apparently it doesn't matter what file system it is formatted to as the router 'translates' it for mac and pc anyways.
However my dad saw that the time capsule back up and is a good router and wanted to get of those. Then I found out that without slightly hacking the asus router you can't use time machine to a connected storage device.
Anybody have any ideas as to what it better/ more reliable. Should I buy the asus router and then a separate hdd for backing up the mac?
Thanks
Dominik

 

[ksham]

I can only disapprove of getting the Time Capsule. My sister is an apple fangirl and we did try that, but the Time Machine sometimes lag so opening files tend to be annoying, especially when multiple users are streaming shows. And I can't expand the Time Capsule so I'd have to buy another one (expensive) or use an external option (slow).