Silex SX-3000GB - Device server - 10Mb LAN, 100Mb LAN, GigE, USB 2.0 (SX-3000GB-US)

All my gear is upstairs with my four year old MacBook Pro while my new Mac Mini is downstairs in my entertainment center. I have printers that are both USB and network attachable so it's easy to share the printers between computers in the house but USB scanners are a different story. Let's face it, some really good Windows based software isn't available for mac o/s and some of the best graphics software isn't available for Windows, so I run Windows under Fusion on the mac downstairs. I also scan and store photos on the mac downstairs and my old MacBook Pro doesn't have the horsepower to get the job done any more. What I don't want is to move a couple of scanners into my entertainment cabinet and USB cables won't reach upstairs. With the Silex SX-3000GB, I was able to solve the problem. The Silex is great at sharing both USB scanners on the network while leaving them upstairs where I normally work. One scanner is an Epson GT-S50 for high speed duplex scanning of documents and the other is an Epson V600 for flatbed scanning of documents, photos, and negatives. The Silex works very well with both of these scanners. I don't notice any delays or speed degradation for either of these scanners. It might be different if I were to mount a USB hard drive to the Silex, but for scanners this device is fantastic. I initially had difficulty on the virtual Windows o/s because I forgot to install the scanners via USB first. That is a very important first lesson. Get the devices working as USB attached devices first to get the correct drivers installed, then move them to the Silex. Since doing that everything has been great. I can attach either scanner to the mac o/s or to the windows o/s. There is no difference in functionality or capability. My house is wired with Cat5E and I run Linksys Gig switches so I get very good throughput even if not true Gig speed. Come on, they're USB scanners. What should you expect? I can't give exact measurements but perception is good enough for me and they seem as fast as if direct connected via USB. I've had the Silex in operation for a couple of months now and once I got the scanners working correctly, there have been few if any problems. At most, I had to reboot the device server when a scanner got confused but that's only happened once. For simple installations on Windows or Mac OS, I'd rate the Silex a 1.5 on a 1 to 5 point scale of difficulty. For something more complex like Windows and Mac OS and VMware Fusion, I'd give it a 2.0 on a 1 to 5 scale of difficulty. Generally easy.If you need to locate USB only devices somewhere other than next to your computer, the Silex SX-3000GB is a great way to do it. I haven't connected a USB drive to it but I already have a NAS. (Why wouldn't you spend a few buck more to get a network attached drive or NAS like QNAP?) Put USB devices on the network with the Silex and put them anywhere in your house (or office).I am VERY pleased with the Silex SX-3000GB device server and I WOULD recommend it to friends and family.

Disappointing, unsatisfactory support. It has been several months since Apple updated OS X to El Capitan and Silex has not provided a compatible version. They blame Apple for the delay. They have sold me a relatively expensive device that now will have to be replaced by a new server, hopefully from a company that supports its customers.Do not buy as tomorrow they might be unable to support upgrades of your preferred OS.

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.==============================================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.

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

Needed to allow software running in virtual machine (Hyper-V guest) to see USB security keys. In guest driver install and connection to USB server was easy and without issue. Note there are a number of options on the software (once running) to configure to ensure that the USB keys are seen after guest gets rebooted like a local USB device would be seen. While a 2012R2 Hyper-V and 20012R2 guest can do this without the USB server the guest was 2008R2.Overall very happy and was significantly lower cost then other options.