Belkin Gigabit Ethernet ExpressCard with 1 External Port ( F5U250 )

by Belkin

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 10.5 x 7.5 x 3.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B000GB0N14
• Item model number: F5U250
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #20,169 in Electronics (See Top 100 in Electronics)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: July 7, 2004

Product Description

From the manufacturer

Why ExpressCard? ExpressCard, the new standard destined to replace CardBus, effectively quadruples the amount of available computing bandwidth. This results in faster music downloads, smoother streaming video, and lightning-fast access to mass-storage devices.

The Belkin Multimedia Reader and Writer ExpressCard offers the perfect solution for users who want to add a media reader to their notebook computers. The Card is designed to take advantage of the additional bandwidth and features provided by the new ExpressCard I/O interconnection standard. Now you can drag and drop files, images, and music to your computer from your digital camera, PDA, MP3 player, or other device. The ExpressCard future-proofs your computer with technology so advanced that it exceeds the processing-speed capability of many devices currently on the market. Installing the ExpressCard now will give you device-upgrade expansion room for many years to come.

Product Description

EXPRESS GIGALAN CARD * 1-EXTERNAL

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Faster than the competition in Linux, August 28, 2007

By 

S. P. Kendall (Indianapolis, IN USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Belkin Gigabit Ethernet ExpressCard with 1 External Port ( F5U250 ) (Personal Computers)

This is the second gigabit expresscard I've tried on my laptop. The first, a Linksys Expresscard Gigabit Eth Adapter Pci Express, has a spring-loaded RJ-45 jack that folds down to allow for easier storage, but doesn't protect the pins well and they eventually broke. That Linksys card was not very fast; I never really got gigabit speeds with it. This Belkin card is significantly faster, and was detected by Ubuntu Linux (7.04, Feisty Fawn) right away, nothing to load or configure. I would buy one of these again in a heartbeat. This Belkin card is not as cool-looking as the Linksys, but it has it where it counts, and that's speed.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Delivers line speed under Linux, drivers have some issues., April 18, 2010

By 

Mike Hayward (Boulder, CO USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Belkin Gigabit Ethernet ExpressCard with 1 External Port ( F5U250 ) (Personal Computers)

- The card I received has a different plastic housing for the ethernet connecter than depicted. It looks like all the other 3rd party housings now but works fine.
- There are no link activity lights, only link speed (blue == gig, green == 10/100). I don't think the card is defective, after reading cd docs, manual, web site, googling and running at both gig and 100 mbit. It simply doesn't flash for activity which is a nice feature to have for troubleshooting, monitoring.
- Works with 32 bit Windows Vista, x86_64 Fedora Cora 12 straight out of the box. x86_64 Ubuntu 10.04 b2 live cd failed to even enumerate the device.
- Jumbo frame support with the Windows driver is silly; it only supports MTU 1514, 4088, and 9014 so it didn't work optimally with an MTU 7200 network (a lot of gige equipment is MTU/MRU 7200). Hard coding driver to
only work with two different jumbo sizes is lame but this is a Windows issue since linux supports Jumbos as expected. Interrupt rate on an MTU 7200 network can be nearly double what it should and choke performance.
- I was able to receive at an average of 700mbit (~85MB/s) using Windows Vista on a 2.6Ghz Core 2 Duo, confirming another reviewers results. This is a windows limitation, it appears either the driver or windows itself pins one of the cpu cores on a dual core to read iSCSI data, about four times the cpu burn on linux with the exact same hardware and test.
- Fedora Core 12 moves 120MB/s in one direction (line speed) with only 7000 interrupts per second so the hardware supports interrupt coalesce. Bidirectional gave about 150MB/s but this is a limitation of my testing technique... it looks like the hardware can do line speed in at least one direction despite the occassional frame error. I blame the frame error on the hardware since these are never seen with any of my other dozens of adapters plugged into the same D-Link 24 port switch, but I only tested one Belkin device, so maybe it is a marginal connector.
- Markvel Yukon 2 chipset is supported on linux with sky2 driver, but there is a bit of excess latency (as measured with ping) and it has trouble keeping up as can be seen by the 1% dropped packets.

eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:00:5A:11:4C:B0
inet addr:10.0.1.5 Bcast:10.0.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::200:5aff:fe11:4cb0/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:7200 Metric:1
RX packets:16750034 errors:3007 dropped:197469 overruns:28 frame:3007
TX packets:11547815 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:391 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:91600604577 (85.3 GiB) TX bytes:20987881411 (19.5 GiB)
Interrupt:16

kernel log under heavy load
---------------------------
__ratelimit: 11 callbacks suppressed
sky2 0000:0c:00.0: error interrupt status=0x8
sky2 0000:0c:00.0: error interrupt status=0x8
sky2 0000:0c:00.0: error interrupt status=0x8
sky2 0000:0c:00.0: error interrupt status=0x40000008
sky2 0000:0c:00.0: error interrupt status=0x8
sky2 0000:0c:00.0: error interrupt status=0x40000008
sky2 0000:0c:00.0: error interrupt status=0x8
sky2 0000:0c:00.0: error interrupt status=0x40000008
sky2 0000:0c:00.0: error interrupt status=0x8
sky2 0000:0c:00.0: error interrupt status=0x8

This product is trivial to install under both Windows Vista and Fedora. It works as well as can be expected under Windows. The performance is line speed under Linux, but I'd like to see the (probably) driver or hardware improved to eliminate timing and frame errors. It is a bit expensive, the drivers have some issues, but in general it seems to work. Note, I have not tested the Agere chipset or drivers and most experience is with non pci expresscard devices so I can't say how it compares to similar expresscard products.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good throughput, February 11, 2009

By 

Hank3484 (Ottawa, Ontario) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Belkin Gigabit Ethernet ExpressCard with 1 External Port ( F5U250 ) (Personal Computers)

One thing I recommend doing with this product is enabling 9014 byte jumbo packets (device manager - properties - advanced tab). I've used this with my gigabit ethernet router and my networked external hard drive and got just over 200Mbps coming down from the drive (limitation of the spin rate of the drive). I've also used it with a PixeLink GigE Vision camera and was able to get about 900Mbps out of it!