Customer Reviews

10/100/1000 GIGABIT USB DEVICE

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I've only had the SX-3000GB for a couple of days now, so this is a preliminary review. I already own several Belkin F5L009 network usb hubs and I also own a Digi Anywhere USB network hub, so I'm familiar with the technology. I purchased the SX-3000GB to overcome some of the limitations of the other devices, and because I was expecting much greater throughput speeds from the SX-3000GB since it has a gigabit ethernet adapter versus the 10/100 adapters on the other two models.

The SX-3000GB did very well overcoming the limitations of the other two models. The Belkin F5L009 had the limitation that the required software and drivers could not be installed on the Windows Server line (e.g. Windows Server 2003, 2008, Small Business Server 2008, etc.), but would only work on the desktop versions of Windows. This is a big issue if you are running Windows Server operating systems under VMWare's ESX or ESXi bare metal hypervisors, because these products do not supply virtualized USB support to the guest operating systems, and therefore you can't connect a USB device to them without using a network USB bridging device. The Digi Anywhere USB device has drivers for the Windows Server line of operating systems, but suffers from the limitation that you can only connect the entire device to one operating system at a time (i.e. all the USB devices connected to the Anywhere USB hub have to be connected to the same operating system at the same time; you can't have some devices connected to one operating system while other devices are connected to a different operating system at the same time). The SX-3000GB, just like the Belkin F5L009, allows you to connect different USB devices on the hub to different operating systems at the same time, but also supports the Windows Server line of operating systems, so it's a big winner in this regard. It's also less expensive than the Digi Anywhere USB hub.

Unfortunately I was not impressed with the throughput of the SX-3000GB. Having a gigabit ethernet connection I was expecting near native USB 2.0 speeds from the device; however, in this I was disappointed. It looks like the maximum throughput on the ethernet port when communicating with a single USB hard drive is about 65 megabits, which translates into about 9 megabytes of data per second transfer rate from a USB hard drive. In contrast, the same hard drive, when connected directly to a USB 2.0 port on the same computer, yields a throughput of around 30 megabytes per second of data. I suspect that the reason for the poor throughput performance of the SX-3000GB is that it doesn't support jumbo ethernet frames. I haven't put a network analyzer on the SX-3000GB yet to absolutely verify this, but it's been my experience that individual devices which don't support jumbo frames receive very little performance improvement from a gigabit ethernet connection versus a hundred megabit one.

Another interesting find I made while testing the SX-3000GB is that it is apparently the same device as the Belkin F5L009 under the hood, other than the gigabit ethernet port. When I installed the SX-3000GB software it detected, in addition to the new SX-3000GB, all of my existing F5L009 devices. In fact, I was able to control and operate the F5L009 devices from the new software in the same manner as the SX-3000GB. The other giveaway is that the software interface, although branded with Silex and sporting a slightly different layout and color scheme, looked and acted very similarly to the software that came with the Belkin F5L009. Because of that one thing you need to be careful about is if you install the SX-3000GB software on a computer that already has the Belkin F5L009 software on it, make sure to not to have both the Belkin software and the Silex version running at the same time. Before I realized that the Silex software had seen and was communicating with the F5L009 hubs, I had the Belkin software running at the same time, and the two got into some sort of a loop passing a USB device back and forth between the them. I had to use task manager to kill the Belkin software in order to break the loop. Since the SX-3000GB software is the newer version I have stopped using the Belkin software on my computers. I haven't tried to uninstall it yet, as I'm concerned that it might inadvertently uninstall the newer drivers provided by Silex at the same time. I would recommend that if you already have Belkin F5L009 software installed on your computer, that you uninstall it before installing the SX-3000GB software, as you can use the new software to control both. I also gained a side benefit of being able to now control my Belkin F5L009 hubs from Windows Server 2008 simply as a result of installing the Silex software.

One last issue regarding the software, if possible run the initial device configuration utility from WinXP. When I ran the device configuration utility from Windows 7 64 bit, it couldn't find the SX-3000GB, even after turning off the firewall and giving the utility the unit's DHCP assigned IP address. You only need to run this utility once, to do things like set the permanent IP address and gateway address. The application software which provides the control of the attached USB devices works fine on Windows 7.

All in all I think this is a very good device if you are running Windows Server VMs under VMWare's ESX or ESXi hypervisor, as the software works with those operating systems and the product allows individual USB devices to be shared between the various VMs on an individual basis, which is not the case with the Digi Anywhere USB device.

However, if you are looking at this device as a replacement for a Belkin F5L009 in order to get better speed, you had best do a speed test on the Belkin device first and see if it's going to be worth it, as you aren't going to get anywhere near native USB 2.0 speed from the SX-3000GB either.

Lastly, if you are in need of a network USB 2.0 hub and don't have one at all yet, I think this product is the best of the three, even though it's not as fast as it should be.

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Edit 5/6/2010:

I emailed technical support about the speed issue and asked about jumbo frames. The response I got was pretty much a bunch of mumbo jumbo about how difficult it is to get usb hard disks to perform better, and no mention about whether or not the device supported jumbo frames. I emailed back and directly asked again whether or not the device supported jumbo frames. This time I received no reply. Therefore I'm lowing my overall rating to two stars and adding a tag for Technical Support with one star, as their response was completely unhelpful and evasive.

I was looking for a product that allows us to remotely access the USB connected console port on an industrial power supply, as well as some other equipment that uses the FTDI USB-to-serial chip. This product does a great job handling this difficult task. The control software for the power supply is about as dumb as they come but with this product, it worked well and thought it was operating with a USB device directly connected to the computer. Instead, it was being accessed over ethernet and was none the wiser. Expect the usual network hassles. I had to locate the IP address of the device and force the SX Virtual Link client to use that IP address in order to find it on a different subnet, but once I got past that hurtle, everything else worked great. I am not dealing with high data throughput, so the other comments saying it is slow do not affect me. It probably is slow, but it has not impacted what I need. I even have a 7-port Belkin USB hub (Belkin Hi-Speed USB 2.0 7-Port Hub F5U237-APL-S) connected to one of the two SX3000 ports and the industrial power supply on the other. Every USB device connected works great, including the eleven FTDI-based USB-to-Serial devices.

A couple of important things to add. It does work under Windows 7 as well as OSX 10.6 in 64-bit kernel mode. However, to get it to work under OSX 10.6, do not install SX Virtual Link using DSSetup.app at the root folder of the install CD. Instead, go to /Utility/SXVirtualLink on the install CD and double click on SXVirtualLink_10_6.mpkg. DSSetup.app appears to have a bug and does not choose the correct version of SX Virtual Link to install. By choosing SXVirtualLink_10_6.mpkg directly, you know the correct version is installed. Without this important step, you will never connect to any USB device, at least that was my experience.

One minor issue ... I could never get a USB barcode scanner to work with OSX 10.6, but it works fine under Windows. It uses USB HID so I was surprised it did not work. I tried a Dell USB keyboard that also worked fine under Windows but not OSX 10.6. So you really have to try this out to see if it will work with your particular device.

Unlike the other reviewer here, I was unable to get better than USB 1.0 ("full" speed), which is 12 mb/s. Further, when I connected a device through a hub - something that is supposedly explicitly supported by the SX 3000 GB - it claimed it was connected, but no software other than the Silex connection manager could actually see the device.

If you need USB 2.0 throughput from a remote device, there still doesn't seem to be a solution. Well, aside from connecting the device directly to a remote computer and using VNC or something similar, which is what I ended up doing.

- Gus

I needed to be able to download picture and video from a Sony camcorder's USB 2.0 port, but I needed to convert it to Ethernet. The product worked flawlessly. I also used it on a Digital Still Camera and once again I have to give this product praise. I did a test and I was able to download 35MB worth of pictures in a little over a second.

Below is a message I sent to Silex Technology about the SX-3000GB

I have the SX-3000GB directly connected to a D-Link DIR655 "N" wireless router operating in the N protocol only. Attached directly to the SX-3000GB is a Samsung 2TB SATA II drive in an IcyDock MB589UEA enclosure, and a Maxtor 750MB SATA II drive in a Rosewill RS-DU100 drive dock. Using HDTune Pro v4.01 the drives, when connected directly into my Dell e1705 both benchmark at approximately 14MB minimum and 17MB Maximum. However, when connected through the SX-3000GB they benchmark at 0.4MB inimum and 1.6MB maximum. The Dell has an Intel dual core processor, 3gb of ram, an Intel 4965AGN network adapter connecting at 300 Mbps, and is running Windows XP ro SP2. It is located less than 15 feet from the router with one (1) wall between the router and the Dell. However, the results under Windows 7 on the same Dell are slightly higher at a 2.1MB maximum. I cannot believe that these are the results that I should be receiving. If they are and I had know it I would NEVER have purchased the SX-3000GB. Is there anything that can be done to improve the performance of the SX-3000GB?

Below is their (next day) response:

>Based on your measurements and if there is no overhead in running a single hard drive, the maximum transfer rate will be approximately 17 Mbps when directly >connected to a PC via USB. This is much slower than the 420Mbps which USB 2.0 supports due to processing overhead at the hardware level.

>When using a Silex device server the data processing, which has already reduced the speed from 420Mbps to 17Mbps (5% of Maximum), is emulated through the TCP/IP >connection resulting in greatly reduced data transfer speeds. There is also some overhead added due to error detection/prevention within the TCP/IP stack but this >is negligible.

>If you are using a real time virus scanner there will also be an additional data speed reduction as the packets being emulated must pass the virus filter before >being passed to/from the network. This speed reduction would not effect USB data transfers as they are beyond the scanning of the virus software.

>Silex Technical Support

So, as I read it, my results are typical. Read speed is poor, but write speed is intolerable. The best I can say about it is that it functions.

The Silex SX-3000GB is a great idea, but not ready for prime time... or any other time.

Save your money on this item.

Lo utilizo con una consola yamaha y su interface para crear una red y poder manejar mi consola desde el computador

item works fine for everything except usb tv tuner sharing; list of tested usb tv tuners i got from tech support was sad and non available for sale anymore; every currently availabile usb tv tuner i have tried has caused blue screen of death