I've been unable to find a clear explanation of what the purpose of hardware NAT is for on my router.
There were some reports that disabling this increased the wired connection speeds with this off.
Are there any side-effects by disabling this option?
Answer
I've been unable to find a clear explanation of what the purpose of hardware NAT is for on my router.
Very cheap switches are extremely fast and efficient even though they don't have powerful CPUs. That's because they do all of their important switching functions with dedicated hardware.
By contrast, typical home routers do all their routing functions in software. This means that they either have to have fast CPUs (high cost, lots of power used) or performance will suffer. Hardware NAT is a way to accelerate NAT routing functions with hardware so that the CPU doesn't have to process the bulk of the routed traffic.
There were some reports that disabling this increased the wired connection speeds with this off.
It's not surprising that this might happen in some cases. For one thing, hardware NAT in small routers is pretty new. There are likely some limitations that, at least in some cases, will cause it to perform very badly. For example, the hardware NAT table may have a limited number of NAT entry slots. If you overflow that table, performance might suffer.
Are there any side-effects by disabling this option?
You will lose the hardware acceleration. But you will also avoid the potential limitations and problems.
My recommendation would be this:
1) If you don't need anywhere near the full routing performance your router is capable off, leave it off. You don't need it and this will avoid any possible problems.
2) If you do use hardware NAT and experience problems with dropped connections or slowness, try disabling hardware NAT. If that solves your problem, keep it off.
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