Silex Sx-3000gb 10/100/1000 Gigabit Usb Device

by Silex Technology

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 6.2 x 5.5 x 2.5 inches ; 10.9 ounces
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• ASIN: B003AM0DNY
• Item model number: SX-3000GB
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #56,451 in Electronics (See Top 100 in Electronics)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: March 2, 2010

Product Description

Silex SX-3000GB Device Server SX-3000GB Terminal & Device Servers

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Works well with all Windows versions, but speed is disappointing and so is tech support., April 28, 2010

By 

Concerned Citizen (USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Silex Sx-3000gb 10/100/1000 Gigabit Usb Device (Electronics)

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.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Allows connectivity to USB devices without USB class support, April 19, 2011

By 

Stephen Goadhouse (Cville, VA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Silex Sx-3000gb 10/100/1000 Gigabit Usb Device (Electronics)

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.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Spotty and slow, May 4, 2010

By 

Gus Smedstad (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Silex Sx-3000gb 10/100/1000 Gigabit Usb Device (Electronics)

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