I would suspect the quieter at idle is because of helium.

I have both drives and can confirm the old bruisers are pretty loud.

Drives are going to be a little louder doing a random workload than when idle or doing sequential work

Gotta turn the labhouse into a labhome

I wonder if the big copper heatsinks are worth more than the CPUs

Cascade is for if you have a special service provision from AT&t. Possibly static IPs, possibly something else.

IP pass through is what you use for a typical consumer connection where you just want to forward all of the ports directly to your desired router. And I use that and it works fine

I think I remember having to reboot both the AT&t box in my router a couple of times to make the IP pass through really stick. Also, I possibly had to manually assign the Mac address rather than use some sort of auto detections scheme

I would check the logs on the ASUS router to see if any traffic is coming to it.