People extend their routers for purposes other than increased storage, which, in most cases, is actually the least important reason. I don't know anything about the Verizon router that you use, but in my case, I've converted a number of absurdly old and discontinued Linksys routers into high-end routers with features that would cost you hundreds if not thousands of bucks if purchased from the specialty HW vendors. It constitutes a whole hobby culture of its own and is immensely satisfying and rewarding once you get the hang of it. And the crazy thing is that it requires no more than the ability to nuke the OS that comes with the thing and flashing another Linux-based one in its place. I'm assuming some basic Linux knowledge, but it really isn't that hard.
As I said, don't know anything about the Verizon router, and for all I know, it will only accept
Lemonade. But there are tons of old routers on ebay that will take a firmware upgrade. Imagine buying one for $10 and turning it into something with a feature set that commercial router manufacturers sell for $3,000.
I use
dd-wrt on mine, but others go with
openWRT or
tomato. I've just linked to them for your convenience. This forum is not the place to get into the details, but each of these firmware sites host their own universe of specialized forums.
Re: the USB port on your router. The real purpose of this port using
lemonade is to store apps for the router alone, not data for shared use, and 4GB is immense. A flashed router can act as a: commercial WIFI hotspot, VPN server, VOIP gateway, simple web server, mail server and dozens of other uses, all running on a dinky little residential router.
If serious, be prepared to get lost in a whole 'nuther world.
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