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Technical Details
- Brand Name: Netgear
- Model: XAVB5001-100NAS
- Network Data Transfer Rate: 500 Megabits Per Second
- Weight: 1.40 pounds
Product Details
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Product Description
The netgear powerline av 500 adapter kit extends your internet access to any electrical outlet for the most demanding applications. it offers easy, plug-and-play setup and provides faster speeds for the most demanding applications. perfect for connecting hdtvs, blu-ray players, dvrs, pcs and game consoles to your home network and the internet.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
106 of 113 people found the following review helpful
By J. Schaeffer
I approach this review in the hopes of helping fellow home techies who were looking for a quick run down and potential benefit over older Powerline Adapter kits/units. Some good reviews in here detail the outputs of the units here in super fine detail. I'm sure many will find that helpful. I myself was looking for quick info on whether the AV500's were better than AV200's in general, or at least, better than my Netgear XAV2001 kit (AV200 "rated").
Most people know that the supposed throughput of a powerline adapter is pretty much BS. Saying one of these is "Gigabit" is pretty misleading. Mind you this really isn't a complaint. This feeds into the "more must be better" mentality in the tech industry. If you haven't figured out that this isn't always true, then let this product type be a key example. BUT...for me the question always has boiled down, for these types of products, is it in fact fast? Fast for what? Faster than the previous line? (I'm a habitual upgrader and am willing to pay to play if in fact the product offers a substantial benefit over my current gear.)
So as I said I own the Netgear AV200/"200 Mbit" kit (XAV2001 I believe). I have previously used Linksys 85Mbit adapters to effect, and we have wireless in the house, but the AV200's were good performers and worth the ~$100 I spent on them, and adequately replaced wireless where I had some serious dead spots in my house. I dropped into Staples last night and lo and behold, they had the Netgear AV500 kit in their pretty red box for $139. I decided to give it a go, figuring if my network performance was significantly better, I'd keep them. If not, I'd return them, having kept the packaging perfect, and ensuring Staples would take them back if Netgear had BS'd the numbers.
My overall setup is rather nightmarish to describle so I'll detail just the following:
1.) The AV500's went exactly in the place of the two AV200's. They are on separate ends of the house laterally , source on main floor, destination on second floor
2.) Same exact Cat 5 and Cat 6 cables in the same exact place
3.) While I seriously doubt this had any impact, I substituted an 8 port Cisco 10/100 switch for an 8 port Netgear ProSage Gigabit switch. (In theory I'm not touching the upper end capability of the Cisco switch so that's why I say it should not make a difference, but I point it out to not mislead.)
4.) Use: The AV500s link an AV Closet in a "black hole" of my house (the master bedroom) to a DLINK dual band Gigabit N-Router. The overall feed is, from Source to Destination, [FiOS Modem > NetGear 24 port Gigabit Switch > DLINK Gigabit Router > Netgear AV500 Unit 1 (Source) > Netgear AV500 Unit 2 (AV Closet) > Netgear ProSafe Gigabit Switch > Components).
5.) Components
a.) Windows 7 PC / media server with 4 TB of stored lossless music and MKV/MP4 videos
b.) Tivo Series 3 (x2)
c.) Xbox 360
d.) BR Player
e.) DLink Boxee (love this, 5 stars)
6.) AV200 vs AV500 - the beef
Prior to installing the AV200's 9 months ago, my network performance in the destination area of the house was dismal. Averaging a series of speedtest.net runs where the only thing in the "component" list above that was using the network was the PC, I was getting avg 400Kbit/sec on a system that had previosuly scored 40Mbit Down 35Mbit Up in "wireless hot spots". The ~40Mb down speed was proven on several Speedtest.net runs and I'd proven it out when I downloaded a 1.7 GB file in under 7 minutes via a swarm, over wireless (in a much better location in the house).
Download rates sustained for minutes at a time touched 4.3MegaByte per second. I was thrilled.
Needless to say, when I saw the 90% drop in wireless performance in a critical area of the house, I knew I needed something better. I had built an AV closet in a bad spot of the house (well, bad for network, else great for my purposes).
Installing the original Netgear AV200's, I saw speeds come back up to 2.2MegaByte per second. Speedtest.net showed similar Mb numbers (16-20MBit Down, 10-13MBit Up.)
AV200's would have been ok but I was running into several problems. Beyond the closet, there are Tivos downstairs which require that the Powerline adapters be the medium between my PC/Server upstairs. PyTivo being the encoder, I saw a significant difference between "local" xfers in the bedroom, and xfers from upstairs to the downstairs area. Generally PyTivo could playback in realtime (initiate xfer, no wait, watch) on movies upto 720p. 1080 MKV containers took a little bit to get running, but overall, not bad. 1080 files xferred downstairs were a joke. I had to initiate the xter WELL in advance of watching it.
SO...what do the AV500's do? Get this. Last night, first test - shut down all components except the PC. Begin download of a very popular show which should present the full challenge to the AV500's. Sustained speed download? 5.2MegaByte a second. I was very surprised. I would have kept these units if they'd come within 80% of my original wireless 4.2-4.4MB/sec. But to exceed their performance, simply floored me. I had pretty modest expectations that AV500s would defeat the AV200s. I was wrong. And I do love when I'm wrong and it benefits me.
My 0.02 are that if my review hits on your , and you simply want to know if in the same exact setting these AV500's will improve your AV85/AV100/AV200 Netgear pair (or trio...), go for it. If you change nothing else, I am pretty confident you'll see quite a nice bump in performance.
Most people know that the supposed throughput of a powerline adapter is pretty much BS. Saying one of these is "Gigabit" is pretty misleading. Mind you this really isn't a complaint. This feeds into the "more must be better" mentality in the tech industry. If you haven't figured out that this isn't always true, then let this product type be a key example. BUT...for me the question always has boiled down, for these types of products, is it in fact fast? Fast for what? Faster than the previous line? (I'm a habitual upgrader and am willing to pay to play if in fact the product offers a substantial benefit over my current gear.)
So as I said I own the Netgear AV200/"200 Mbit" kit (XAV2001 I believe). I have previously used Linksys 85Mbit adapters to effect, and we have wireless in the house, but the AV200's were good performers and worth the ~$100 I spent on them, and adequately replaced wireless where I had some serious dead spots in my house. I dropped into Staples last night and lo and behold, they had the Netgear AV500 kit in their pretty red box for $139. I decided to give it a go, figuring if my network performance was significantly better, I'd keep them. If not, I'd return them, having kept the packaging perfect, and ensuring Staples would take them back if Netgear had BS'd the numbers.
My overall setup is rather nightmarish to describle so I'll detail just the following:
1.) The AV500's went exactly in the place of the two AV200's. They are on separate ends of the house laterally , source on main floor, destination on second floor
2.) Same exact Cat 5 and Cat 6 cables in the same exact place
3.) While I seriously doubt this had any impact, I substituted an 8 port Cisco 10/100 switch for an 8 port Netgear ProSage Gigabit switch. (In theory I'm not touching the upper end capability of the Cisco switch so that's why I say it should not make a difference, but I point it out to not mislead.)
4.) Use: The AV500s link an AV Closet in a "black hole" of my house (the master bedroom) to a DLINK dual band Gigabit N-Router. The overall feed is, from Source to Destination, [FiOS Modem > NetGear 24 port Gigabit Switch > DLINK Gigabit Router > Netgear AV500 Unit 1 (Source) > Netgear AV500 Unit 2 (AV Closet) > Netgear ProSafe Gigabit Switch > Components).
5.) Components
a.) Windows 7 PC / media server with 4 TB of stored lossless music and MKV/MP4 videos
b.) Tivo Series 3 (x2)
c.) Xbox 360
d.) BR Player
e.) DLink Boxee (love this, 5 stars)
6.) AV200 vs AV500 - the beef
Prior to installing the AV200's 9 months ago, my network performance in the destination area of the house was dismal. Averaging a series of speedtest.net runs where the only thing in the "component" list above that was using the network was the PC, I was getting avg 400Kbit/sec on a system that had previosuly scored 40Mbit Down 35Mbit Up in "wireless hot spots". The ~40Mb down speed was proven on several Speedtest.net runs and I'd proven it out when I downloaded a 1.7 GB file in under 7 minutes via a swarm, over wireless (in a much better location in the house).
Download rates sustained for minutes at a time touched 4.3MegaByte per second. I was thrilled.
Needless to say, when I saw the 90% drop in wireless performance in a critical area of the house, I knew I needed something better. I had built an AV closet in a bad spot of the house (well, bad for network, else great for my purposes).
Installing the original Netgear AV200's, I saw speeds come back up to 2.2MegaByte per second. Speedtest.net showed similar Mb numbers (16-20MBit Down, 10-13MBit Up.)
AV200's would have been ok but I was running into several problems. Beyond the closet, there are Tivos downstairs which require that the Powerline adapters be the medium between my PC/Server upstairs. PyTivo being the encoder, I saw a significant difference between "local" xfers in the bedroom, and xfers from upstairs to the downstairs area. Generally PyTivo could playback in realtime (initiate xfer, no wait, watch) on movies upto 720p. 1080 MKV containers took a little bit to get running, but overall, not bad. 1080 files xferred downstairs were a joke. I had to initiate the xter WELL in advance of watching it.
SO...what do the AV500's do? Get this. Last night, first test - shut down all components except the PC. Begin download of a very popular show which should present the full challenge to the AV500's. Sustained speed download? 5.2MegaByte a second. I was very surprised. I would have kept these units if they'd come within 80% of my original wireless 4.2-4.4MB/sec. But to exceed their performance, simply floored me. I had pretty modest expectations that AV500s would defeat the AV200s. I was wrong. And I do love when I'm wrong and it benefits me.
My 0.02 are that if my review hits on your , and you simply want to know if in the same exact setting these AV500's will improve your AV85/AV100/AV200 Netgear pair (or trio...), go for it. If you change nothing else, I am pretty confident you'll see quite a nice bump in performance.
106 of 116 people found the following review helpful
By JC-Austin
After recently dropping my satellite subscription and moving to MythTV, I needed to find a way to get HD video streams from my Antennas Direct DB2 Multi Directional HDTV Antenna and SiliconDust HDHomeRun HDHR-US Dual Networked High Definition Digital Television (White) to a TV in the house that has no options for directly wired ethernet. Wireless (G or N) didn't prove to be reliable or fast enough, so the Netgear 500 mbps (theoretical) powerline adapters seemed like a good bet.
Testing was performed in a ~3-year old house and the 2 adapters were several rooms apart from one another on the same floor. With these adapters, performance can typically vary significantly based on wiring within the house, so YMMV.
As a preview of the results, while they didn't achieve anywhere near the advertised 250 mbps (~31 MB/s) in each direction, they did perform much better than older generation powerline adapters I've used. When I plugged in the adapters, the Netgear software reported that I was getting ~220 Mbps in each direction, which was encouraging, but ultimately not even close to accurate.
In addition to testing the adapters, I also wanted to test the efficiencies of different network protocols to see what would work best for streaming HD content to my XBMC / MythTV box. Below are the results.
Testing was done using commands like the following on a Ubuntu Linux machine that tests reads and write speeds to network-mounted disk.
Write: time dd if = /dev/zero of = /mnt/storagesmb/testfilesmb1 bs=16k count=16384
Read: time dd if = /mnt/storagesmb/testfilesmb1 of= /dev /null bs=16k
(some extra spaces were added in the above lines to prevent Amazon's URL filtering from editing those lines out)
Since the focus of my testing was primarily to verify read speeds from a media frontend to a backend storage server, I did not do significant write testing.
Disk Read/Write Test Results:
Protocol Test Type File Size Rsize (nfs) Throughput
SMB Write 256MB na 03.8 MB/s
SMB Read 256MB na 03.9 MB/s
NFS v3 Write 256MB na 05.4 MB/s
NFS v3 Read 256MB 16,384 09.3 MB/s
NFS v3 Read 256MB 32,768 10.8 MB/s
*** Amazon mangles any sort of tabular data when included in a review, so if you prefer to see the review in its original format, it is also available on my blog: [...] (Unfortunately, Amazon doesn't allow URLs in reviews, so copy/paste that into your browser and remove the spaces in the URL to find it)
Next, a separate set of tests was done using iperf between two Ubuntu Linux machines. The server resides on a large RAID array capable of reads and writes upwards of 500 MB/s, so disk speeds were not a limitation in this testing.
In theory, the iperf test should remove most inefficiencies related to network protocol and show raw throughput. As it turns out, the results are very similar to the NFS testing above, which speaks well of the NFS protocol.
iperf results:
***ONE DIRECTIONAL TEST
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.1.111, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 16.0 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[ 3] local 192.168.1.182 port 42245 connected with 192.168.1.111 port 5001
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 90.8 MBytes 75.9 Mbits/sec (9.49 MB/s)
***BIDIRECTIONAL (SIMULTAENOUS) TEST
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.1.111, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 55.0 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[ 5] local 192.168.1.182 port 60753 connected with 192.168.1.111 port 5001
[ 4] local 192.168.1.182 port 5001 connected with 192.168.1.111 port 59780
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 5] 0.0-10.0 sec 57.4 MBytes 48.0 Mbits/sec (6.00 MB/s)
[ 4] 0.0-10.1 sec 43.0 MBytes 35.7 Mbits/sec (4.46 MB/s)
Combined => ~83.7 Mbits/sec (10.46 MB/s)
SMB vs. NFS Conclusion:
While this is probably no surprise to many, NFS is vastly more efficient. Using the same commands and testing read speeds with a 32k rsize, nfs outperforms smb by ~280%.
The difference was noticeable on XBMC performance as well. When my network shares were mounted using SMB, I was unable to smoothly stream high bitrate uncompressed 1080p bluray rips (i.e. Avatar). However, when using NFS, it played absolutely everything I could throw at it.
Netgear XAVB5001 Conclusion:
Bottom line, if your wiring is fairly modern and free of interference, while these adapters fall far short of their advertised 500 Mbps speeds, they should be more than capable of streaming your uncompressed HD content if you can serve your files via NFS. Even if you are stuck using SMB (Windows network file sharing), most of your content will work without issue, but high bitrate uncompressed bluray will likely not play 100% smoothly.
Testing was performed in a ~3-year old house and the 2 adapters were several rooms apart from one another on the same floor. With these adapters, performance can typically vary significantly based on wiring within the house, so YMMV.
As a preview of the results, while they didn't achieve anywhere near the advertised 250 mbps (~31 MB/s) in each direction, they did perform much better than older generation powerline adapters I've used. When I plugged in the adapters, the Netgear software reported that I was getting ~220 Mbps in each direction, which was encouraging, but ultimately not even close to accurate.
In addition to testing the adapters, I also wanted to test the efficiencies of different network protocols to see what would work best for streaming HD content to my XBMC / MythTV box. Below are the results.
Testing was done using commands like the following on a Ubuntu Linux machine that tests reads and write speeds to network-mounted disk.
Write: time dd if = /dev/zero of = /mnt/storagesmb/testfilesmb1 bs=16k count=16384
Read: time dd if = /mnt/storagesmb/testfilesmb1 of= /dev /null bs=16k
(some extra spaces were added in the above lines to prevent Amazon's URL filtering from editing those lines out)
Since the focus of my testing was primarily to verify read speeds from a media frontend to a backend storage server, I did not do significant write testing.
Disk Read/Write Test Results:
Protocol Test Type File Size Rsize (nfs) Throughput
SMB Write 256MB na 03.8 MB/s
SMB Read 256MB na 03.9 MB/s
NFS v3 Write 256MB na 05.4 MB/s
NFS v3 Read 256MB 16,384 09.3 MB/s
NFS v3 Read 256MB 32,768 10.8 MB/s
*** Amazon mangles any sort of tabular data when included in a review, so if you prefer to see the review in its original format, it is also available on my blog: [...] (Unfortunately, Amazon doesn't allow URLs in reviews, so copy/paste that into your browser and remove the spaces in the URL to find it)
Next, a separate set of tests was done using iperf between two Ubuntu Linux machines. The server resides on a large RAID array capable of reads and writes upwards of 500 MB/s, so disk speeds were not a limitation in this testing.
In theory, the iperf test should remove most inefficiencies related to network protocol and show raw throughput. As it turns out, the results are very similar to the NFS testing above, which speaks well of the NFS protocol.
iperf results:
***ONE DIRECTIONAL TEST
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.1.111, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 16.0 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[ 3] local 192.168.1.182 port 42245 connected with 192.168.1.111 port 5001
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 90.8 MBytes 75.9 Mbits/sec (9.49 MB/s)
***BIDIRECTIONAL (SIMULTAENOUS) TEST
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.1.111, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 55.0 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[ 5] local 192.168.1.182 port 60753 connected with 192.168.1.111 port 5001
[ 4] local 192.168.1.182 port 5001 connected with 192.168.1.111 port 59780
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 5] 0.0-10.0 sec 57.4 MBytes 48.0 Mbits/sec (6.00 MB/s)
[ 4] 0.0-10.1 sec 43.0 MBytes 35.7 Mbits/sec (4.46 MB/s)
Combined => ~83.7 Mbits/sec (10.46 MB/s)
SMB vs. NFS Conclusion:
While this is probably no surprise to many, NFS is vastly more efficient. Using the same commands and testing read speeds with a 32k rsize, nfs outperforms smb by ~280%.
The difference was noticeable on XBMC performance as well. When my network shares were mounted using SMB, I was unable to smoothly stream high bitrate uncompressed 1080p bluray rips (i.e. Avatar). However, when using NFS, it played absolutely everything I could throw at it.
Netgear XAVB5001 Conclusion:
Bottom line, if your wiring is fairly modern and free of interference, while these adapters fall far short of their advertised 500 Mbps speeds, they should be more than capable of streaming your uncompressed HD content if you can serve your files via NFS. Even if you are stuck using SMB (Windows network file sharing), most of your content will work without issue, but high bitrate uncompressed bluray will likely not play 100% smoothly.
22 of 23 people found the following review helpful
By kwc5776
Amazon Verified Purchase
This new Netgear XAVB5001 was worth the wait! I had been waiting since December for this product to come out. I had gotten a Sony Blu-ray for Christmas and already had a Netflix account. So I wanted to watch "instant" movies through the Blu-ray. I had a strong Wi-fi connection throughout the house, so I didn't think using the Wi-fi for the Blu-ray would be a problem. Watching a movie through Netflix instant cue was impossible. The movie might run for 10 minutes, but then it would freeze and wait to buffer, but it never would. So I started looking at Powerline ethernet adapters, as the second story of our house prevented easily running ethernet cable to the TV location.
Netgear really strung out the release of these AV500 compatible adapters, and I almost gave up waiting, instead going with some AV200 units. But I decided it couldn't be much longer...so I waited for the Netgear release. I can honestly say that when these arrived, I plugged in one unit near the computer and connected it to the wireless router using one of the supplied ethernet cables. I then went in to the gameroom and plugged in the other unit to the wall, and used the other included ethernet cable to connect to the Blu-ray player. I then modified the Blu-ray to connect "wired" instead of wireless and...Bam! Instant connection. And since then, no video, music, or any other media available through the Sony Blu-ray has hiccupped at all. Netflix streams smoothly...even fast forwarding or rewinding doesn't result in a wait of more than 2 or 3 seconds.
I admit I don't know what the transfer rate is on these units in my setup, but they work great for me. I highly recommend the XAVB 5001 from Netgear.
Netgear really strung out the release of these AV500 compatible adapters, and I almost gave up waiting, instead going with some AV200 units. But I decided it couldn't be much longer...so I waited for the Netgear release. I can honestly say that when these arrived, I plugged in one unit near the computer and connected it to the wireless router using one of the supplied ethernet cables. I then went in to the gameroom and plugged in the other unit to the wall, and used the other included ethernet cable to connect to the Blu-ray player. I then modified the Blu-ray to connect "wired" instead of wireless and...Bam! Instant connection. And since then, no video, music, or any other media available through the Sony Blu-ray has hiccupped at all. Netflix streams smoothly...even fast forwarding or rewinding doesn't result in a wait of more than 2 or 3 seconds.
I admit I don't know what the transfer rate is on these units in my setup, but they work great for me. I highly recommend the XAVB 5001 from Netgear.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great product!
I've been using Netgear's XAVB5001 Powerline Network Adapter for a couple of years now. Before I give my review let me just explain my set up.
Currently I have 3 adapters. Read more
Currently I have 3 adapters. Read more
Published 1 month ago by E. J. McLain
5.0 out of 5 stars
Love it
Got to help with wireless servic for my son to play games online. Works great. No problems. Three more words
Published 2 months ago by Nina
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not as described.....
I have them now, I'll keep them. Only because don't feel like sending back and to pay shipping. already paying for the wires that were incorrectly sent to me. Read more
Published 2 months ago by JamroK
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great units for use when you cannot get a CAT5 cable where you need it...
I have an office that does not have a true ethernet connection in it. To get around this, I purchased the netgear powerline modules. Overall, they perform nicely. Read more
Published 3 months ago by K. Langer
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Product!
I chose this item to increase the bandwidth for my connection to my HDTV. It made an incredible difference and works exactly as advertised.
Published 4 months ago by Marshall S. Poe
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good for me
I have used this for one year. Never had to reset it, never had any problems with it. I just plugged it into the wall, plugged both of them into routers, and now am enjoying 2... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Just Some Guy
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Powerline Adapters!
Excellent Powerline Adapters! provides an extremely stable connection. Make sure you plug these directly into the wall outlets because they will not work plugged into surge... Read more
Published 4 months ago by tekim
4.0 out of 5 stars
Securing network kind of lame
Good product, this is my second set. A little pricey for a dated product. The only thing that bothers me with this product is locking down the network. Read more
Published 5 months ago by Neil B.
5.0 out of 5 stars
not for media streaming!!!
i use this product for my network printer. the router is down stairs and the printer is up stairs. insted of running a CAT5 cable through the house i use this to great affect. Read more
Published 5 months ago by R. sebastian
5.0 out of 5 stars
Won't go back to wireless or long cables ever again - flawless and...
A full article on the DSLReports product webpage.
Bought two pairs of these, they all play securely together at 1/2 gig with no latency. Read more
Bought two pairs of these, they all play securely together at 1/2 gig with no latency. Read more
Published 6 months ago by Rx
