E4200 - a "fail" in my book

Question

Alright, in a nutshell, it sets up easily and as a router, it works pretty much as described. There were a couple of "ups and downs" the first day, but many fewer than I've had with previous Linksys routers. The interface will be very familiar to anyone who has owned a Linksys product in the last 10 years (that includes the good and the bad in that interface.)
It is certainly faster than the router built that AT&T foisted on me as part of their U-verse residential gateway, and it is also certainly faster than the WRT54G that the residential gateway replaced. However, I'm not sure that it's "blindingly faster"; that said, I have only those two G-band routers to compare it to. As an aside, it was really very easy to transfer "routing responsibilities" from the U-verse residential gateway to the E4200. There are good instructions available on the www, and following them closely, they worked the first time.
I get good reception anywhere in the house with this thing (5 bars anywhere I go on my property), though that was never an issue with any router I've every owned. Also, the furthest I can get from router and stay on my property is about 75 feet. I have not taken a device down the block to see how far the coverage goes.
I was not pleased with the fact that Linksys really seems to think that you should be broadcasting your SSID, and without even asking defaults that setting to broadcast the network name. This is a "Network Security 101" no-no. If you want to broadcast SSID on your guest network, knock yourselves out, but on your private network, no way; Linksys should really know better.
That however does not account for the three star rating I gave the E4200. That rating comes from a combination of bad customer service the part of Linksys and bad engineering/design in the "value added" features that they attempted to build into the E4200. Specifically:
* The Twonky media server. It's an emasculated version, don't even think about tweaking the configuration, you can't. I have experience with server based Twonky and thought this was really cool think to have on a router. It's not, it's just a gimmick that probably works well if you have media devices that don't require configuration tweaking (I've never met such a beast.)
* Linksys customer service was really useless on this issue. Eventually they did take my phone number and tell me that senior service engineer would call me back. That was a month ago and I haven't had call, an e-mail, or anything. They did however very successfully point fingers at Twonky, who in turn pointed fingers back at Linksys; you can probably tell where that's going...
* The USB port for network attached storage, again a nice idea, but something is really wrong with it. Having an external USB hard drive plugged into this port is great if all you plan on doing is reading files from the drive. If you plan on adding files to the drive while attached to the router or moving files around on the drive while it's attached to the router, forget it. Twice now these types of operations have resulted in "lost" files (data that the OS can no longer see, and therefore access.) In both cases I've been able to recover most of the lost files using a data recovery utility (which is a pain in the rear), though I did actually permanently loose two files the last time that even the recovery utility couldn't get back. For the record, my experiences have been with two different 1.5 TB drives that I've had for a while and used without issues simply plugged into the back of my computer. Neither drive had any history of misbehaving until it was plugged into the back of the E4200. So, if you want to use the USB port on the back of the E4200 as a simply file server that you unplug and hook up directly to a computer to add files to, it's probably worth it, but don't try and add files over the network or move things around on the drive while it's plugged into the E4200. I'd also make sure that you have backups of anything you put on such a drive somewhere else.
Those three issues are what made the E4200 just "OK". They don't detract from its usefulness or capability as a router, but they are at least part of what commands the premium price asked for the E4200, and they don't really work. Yes, they function in superficial ways, but "superficial" is still a "fail" in my book. 

Answer 1

As far as SSID Broadcast option for your Main network is concerned, you can turn it OFF by logging onto http://192.168.1.1 - Wireless  - Manual - SSID Broadcast - Disabled - -Save Settings....
Coming onto the other end of your issues, i.e., connecting a USB HD to E4200's USB port, works well upto 2 TB if configured correctly, try and follow:
http://www6.nohold.net/Cisco2/ukp.aspx?pid=80&app=vw&vw=1&login=1&json=1&docid=0868d4e24a6a468280c3c...