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Vantec ezShare Adapter

Gordon Mah Ung — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:00:00 -0500

This is the Air Jordan sneaker of sneakernets

Don’t be fooled by the Vantec ezShare’s unassuming looks. This simple six-foot white cable with its Type A USB plugs on either end is actually one of the easiest ways to quickly moves files between two computers. Just plug one end into an available USB port on a box running Windows (XP and up), and plug the other end into the second box.

A Windows Explorer–like app will auto-launch on each machine, letting you drag and drop folders and files between the two PCs. If this sounds an awful lot like Data Drive Thru’s Tornado (reviewed November 2007), that’s because the two products are pretty similar. The file-explorer UI and software functionality of both products are virtually the same. It’s close enough that we have a pretty strong suspicion that the underlying chipsets and software come from the same factory in China. There are a few key differences, though.

The first is the construction. The Tornado has auto-retracting cables, making it a nice portable package. On the other hand, the ezShare works with Macs. That’s right, by plugging one side into a PC and the other side into a Mac (10.4 or greater), you get the same Windows Explorer–like view and ability to drag and drop files between the two machines. That’ll make it even easier to switch from OS X to Windows 7 this fall!

We compared our original Tornado with the ezShare by copying files between a Win XP ThinkPad T60 Core Duo notebook and our midrange Core i7 Dream Machine running Windows 7 64-bit. It was virtually a tie, with both transfer cables taking about 530 seconds to move a 9GB file from the notebook to the desktop. Actually, we’re happy to report that we could even move the large file; after we published our review of the Tornado in 2007, some people reported problems moving files larger than 4GB, and we even subsequently experienced occasional issues when using Windows XP 64-bit. Data Drive Thru was never able to replicate the problem, however. It now seems likely that the culprit was some obscure configuration of the OS, as we didn’t experience any such conflicts with Windows 7.

A simple Windows Explorer-like interface pops up on both machines when copying files.

We also tested the ezShare with smaller transfers and moved about 1.34GB of image files in 96 seconds—top-notch performance for USB 2.0 transfers.

So what’s not to like? The ezShare’s presentation doesn’t exactly impress. While the Tornado makes for a tidy package, the ezShare looks like a plain, run-of-the-mill cable. But at $27 vs. $50 for the Tornado, we’ll live with the ugly cable. And with Mac compatibility thrown in to boot, the ezShare is an obvious winner. Now all it needs to win a Kick Ass is Linux support.

D-Link DIR-685 Xtreme N Storage Router

Michael Brown — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:30:30 -0500

Love the features; hate the performance—and the price tag

D-Link’s DIR-685 Wi-Fi router generated a lot of buzz at CES this past January. And when we took a gander at its spec sheet, we thought it a contender for Best of the Best in the router category; something that would finally displace the Linksys WRT600N, which is becoming hard to find. Alas, ’twas not to be.

The problem certainly isn’t with the DIR-685’s feature set: This router is absolutely loaded with goodies. The 3.2-inch color LCD can inform you of the router’s status and configuration; present digital photos from Flickr, Picasa, and Facebook; display RSS feeds, such as sports scores, weather reports, and stock quotes; and a lot more (this is one router your significant other won’t insist be hidden in a closet).

Next up, there’s a 2.5-inch internal SATA hard drive bay, which can turn the router into a NAS box (complemented by a built-in FTP server and BitTorrent software). There are two USB ports featuring D-Link’s SharePort technology, which allows you to plug in both an external hard drive and a printer and share these devices with any computer on the network. The router’s four-port gigabit switch automatically powers down any ports not in use to save a modest amount of energy.

You won't find a prettier wireless router, but you'll encounter plenty that are much, much better.

The rest of the features are just as valuable, if not as unusual. You can set up a password-protected guest zone, for instance, with the option of limiting access to a set schedule. And there’s both a UPnP server and an iTunes server. Lastly, there’s a Quality of Service engine to help eliminate lag for VoIP and media-streaming applications.

But our enthusiasm over all those whiz-bang features is tempered by the DIR-685’s slug-slow wireless throughput and NAS performance. We’ve been using the aforementioned Linksys WRT600N for comparison for more than a year, but we always retest its performance within a few hours of benchmarking a new contender, just to make sure both products are tested under the same environmental conditions.

The DIR-685 lagged far behind the Linksys in our Kitchen test, where the client is 20 feet away from the router and separated by an insulated wall and a set of plywood cabinets: It delivered TCP/IP throughput of just 45.4Mb/s compared to the Linksys WRT600N’s 98.9Mb/s. The D-Link turned in a particularly poor performance in our Media Room test, where the client is located in a double-insulated room-within-a-room 35 feet from the router, managing TCP/IP throughput of just 4.54Mb/s.

The 2.5-inch drive bay limits your choice of hard drives to notebook models, and D-Link provided us with an 80GB Seagate Momentus 5400.5 hard drive for this evaluation. But we find the router’s lethargic NAS performance more troubling than this physical limitation: The DIR-685 took a full 8:53 (min:sec) to copy a single 3GB file from a PC. Compare that to the Qnap TS-209 Pro II—our Best of the Best NAS pick—which copied the same file in just 2:27.

We won’t complain about a high price tag if a product’s features and performance justify it, but the DIR-685’s $300 price tag—which doesn’t include a hard drive—just rubs us the wrong way.

Belkin N+ Wireless Router

Michael Brown — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 16:00:28 -0500

Be our guest!

With 802.11n Draft 2.0 routers becoming as common as Storm Troopers at Comic-Con, manufacturers need a feature that sets their product apart from the crowd. Like many of its competitors, Belkin added a second radio to its N+ Wireless Router—but this one is used for a very different purpose.

Rather than operating on a separate frequency (to separate audio and video streams from more mundane data), the second 2.4GHz radio on Belkin’s router establishes a guest network that limits clients to Internet access. Belkin’s web interface provides extremely limited access to this second radio’s settings: You can turn this radio on or off, change its SSID and passphrase, and choose between WPA/WPA2 pre-shared key or “Hotel Style” security.

Belkin's engineers limited the N+ to two antennas. Might that explain the router's poor wireless performance?

If the router is operating “Hotel Style,” any guests connecting to the router are greeted by a landing page that informs them they must contact the network administrator to obtain the passphrase in order to gain access to the Internet. In either mode, once they’ve entered the correct phrase, they can surf the web freely while your private network remains off-limits. This feature would be even cooler if you could customize the landing page and upload it to the router’s firmware.

The N+ is equipped with a USB port, but it’s limited to playing host to a FAT, FAT32, or NTFS mass storage device—adding NAS to the router’s repertoire. But we’d be a lot more excited about this feature if it also allowed us to share a USB printer over the network. We’re equally unenthused by the router’s Broadband Download Speedometer, a set of blue LEDs that has appropriated the front-panel real estate typically used to inform you of the status of the ports on the integrated four-port gigabit switch. Where most routers have LEDs that inform you of the speed at which each port is operating—amber for 100Mb/s and green for 1Gb/s, for instance—the N+ provides a graphic representation of your Internet connection’s download speed. Considering that we can obtain our Internet connection speed using any number of websites—in actual numbers—Belkin’s idiot lights just aren’t very useful.

Far more useful is the N+’s support for 802.11e Wi-Fi Multimedia Quality of Service, which assigns VoIP and media traffic higher priority than other types of packets traveling across the network. We also appreciate the fact that we can turn its routing function off and use it solely as a wireless access point and switch. In fact, that’s the role we’ve relegated the N+ to at Maximum PC Lab North, because it’s dead slow as a wireless router.

We tested the N+ with Belkin’s chubby F5D8055 USB Wi-Fi adapter (the 3.13 x 1.13-inch device blocked an adjacent USB port on our notebook) and achieved TCP/IP throughput of a none-too-impressive 54.1Mb/s in our kitchen test (20 feet from the router with an insulated wall and a set of cabinets in between). As you can see from our benchmarks, however, the Belkin performed much better at range than the comparably priced Linksys WRT310N, which has fewer features.

EVGA Killer Xeno Pro

Will Smith — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 14:30:49 -0500

Promising technology, but with too many problems to recommend it

When we reviewed the first Killer network card (Holiday 2006), we found that the meager performance gains it offered couldn’t justify its $250 price tag. Now Killer’s back with the new Xeno, a PCI Express design that costs $100 less than the original card, but it still doesn’t offer much benefit for the price.

The Killer’s big promise with the Xeno is that it will improve your ping in games by offloading network overhead from your CPU to a dedicated processor on the board. To test this claim, we set up two identical test beds in the Lab. Then we joined the same Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead servers and followed the same players in spectator mode while measuring the ping and frame rate on each system at identical intervals, using Fraps. In this test, we measured a fairly consistent ping difference of 5ms in favor of the Xeno, which is in line with what we measured in 2006.

This second-gen Killer network card features a PCI Express design and an onboard PowerPC processor.

The Killer NIC also promises advanced Quality of Service, which prioritizes time-sensitive gaming traffic over less-critical traffic. QoS should let you run bandwidth-intensive tasks, such as BitTorrent, at the same time you play games, without impacting your game. Because Killer runs QoS on the card, it lets you configure priority based on the name of each application’s executable. However, we didn’t experience any benefit from QoS when testing the Xeno. In our side-by-side tests, the Xeno actually suffered a fairly consistent 5ms ping disadvantage compared to the stock machine. We also tested the Xeno on our home broadband, with similar results.

When we experienced wimpy performance, we dug deeper into the Killer’s control panels, which led us to another problem. The Killer applet is very complex and poorly documented. For example, the first thing you should do when using the Killer is input your connection’s real-world upstream and downstream speeds. But, while the tool requests numbers in Kb/s, the web-based tool the app recommends reports in Mb/s. Not a problem for the technically savvy, but confusing for a neophyte. Furthermore, the app automatically defaults the bandwidth to typical DSL speeds, so if you don’t disable bandwidth control before you run the online speed test, you won’t know what your actual bandwidth is, and could inadvertently cap your own connection’s download speeds. If you have a passing knowledge of firewalls and general networking, you shouldn’t have a problem. But, neophytes beware.

We found some other problems. Installing the Xeno on our Windows XP 32-bit test bed caused problems with everything from Digsby to iTunes because the firewall blocked them by default. The BitTorrent client that runs on the card’s CPU couldn’t connect to any of the torrents we tried. We also tested the Xeno on 64-bit Vista and experienced similar problems.

While the Xeno did deliver a meager ping improvement, we still don’t think it adds enough to warrant its price tag.

Netgear MOCA Coax Ethernet Adapter Kit MCAB1001

Gordon Mah Ung — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 19:00:20 -0500

Turn coaxial cable outlets into a high-speed network connection

Netgear’s MOCA (short for Multimedia over Coax Alliance) adapter is the can solution to the can’t. If you can’t get a reliable Wi-Fi signal throughout your home and you can’t make an Ethernet cable run and you can’t tap your home’s electrical grid with a HomePlug Powerline adapter, than MOCA is the can.

Using existing standard cable coax wires, the Netgear MOCA adapter lets you turn your cable TV runs into a “home entertainment network.” What the hell is that? Since the adapter is built around passing data through your cable TV, it’s no surprise that MOCA wants to push its adoption as an easy way to get Internet connectivity to your set top box, game console, or media center PC.

Setup is Joe-six-pack friendly: Just unplug the coax cable from your TV set and plug it into the Netgear MOCA adapter. Run a second coax cable from the adapter to the TV. TV signals are passed through transparently, so your American Idol viewing won’t be disturbed. And if the signal is degraded you can actually change the frequency the adapter operates on.

The kit includes an adapter to plant near your router/modem and another to place near your set-top box or media center PC.

The included patch cable can be used to connect your game console or media center PC to the Fast Ethernet port on the back of the adapter. Power it up and go to the room where your router or modem is located. Now here’s the rub: Do you have a cable run there? If you don’t have a cable outlet in the same room as your router, you’re SOL. Fortunately, in the land of the couch potato, most new homes are prewired for cable TV. Run coax cable to the second Netgear MOCA adapter, run a patch cable to an open Ethernet port on your router or modem, and power up both. If you’re within the guidelines of a maximum cable run of 300 feet, you should be up and running.

The technology promises a theoretical 270Mb/s transfer speed, which is sufficient for high-def content. Using a Linksys Media Center Extender DMA2200, we streamed both standard-def material and high-def material using the Netgear MOCA adapter to our TV.

We also conducted a rudimentary file transfer to simulate how long it would take to move a file from a server to a media center PC. Using the Netgear MOCA, we moved a 2.4GB video file in about seven minutes. Switching to our 802.11g network, the same file transfer took about 13 minutes. Not bad, but certainly not Gigabit Ethernet. We didn’t have 802.11n capability on our network to test its speeds, but we suspect the MOCA’s transfer speeds are similar to the faster Wi-Fi version—with less of a security risk. Since the MOCA is hardwired and its range is fairly short—300 feet—someone would have to jack into your cable line to intercept signals. The packets on the MOCA adapter are also encrypted by default.

So what’s the catch? The biggest ding is the lack of satellite capability. Even though a satellite provider is a member of the Multimedia over Coax Alliance, MOCA devices do not currently work with satellite installations. D’oh! Second, there’s the cost. At $190 for two adapters, it’s certainly not a cheap way to build a home network.

But again, the Netgear MOCA adapter is really for the person who can’t get any other networking methods to work. For that person, the price may just be worth it.

D-Link DAP-1522 Wireless Bridge/Access Point

Michael Brown — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 12:53:51 -0500

D-Link’s DAP-1522 demonstrates the danger of shopping for a product based on its specs. On paper, this combination bridge/access point sounds as though it could solve just about any wireless coverage problem you might have. In reality, it’s a one-trick pony

It’s a dual-band device, meaning it has one radio that operates on the 2.4GHz band and a second radio that runs on the 5GHz band. It’s outfitted with an 802.11n Draft 2.0 chipset, so it should deliver very good throughput speeds (it’s backward compatible with 802.11g networks). And it can be configured as either a wireless bridge or a wireless access point.

As a wireless bridge, the DAP-1522 is designed to connect wired Ethernet devices, such as an Xbox 360 or your cable-TV set-top box, to your wireless router. You plug your wired devices into the bridge, and the bridge establishes a wireless connection to your router. But the DAP-1522 doesn’t have any external antennas, so it delivers extremely poor range; in fact, D-Link advices against placing the device inside a cabinet or closet. But that’s exactly where many people’s gaming console and set-top boxes are going to be located.

Fans of real-world testing that we are, we decided to test the DAP-1522’s wireless bridge capabilities by putting inside our entertainment center anyway; after all, that’s where the gear we needed to connect to our network is located. Sure enough, the bridge couldn’t establish a connection with either of the radios in our dual-band 802.11n router while it was in there. And it couldn’t establish a connection until we moved the bridge into the middle of the room; even then, it managed TCP/IP throughput of just 4.5Mb/sec, which is completely inadequate for streaming video.

The DAP-1522 performed a little better as a wireless access point. In this mode, it must be hardwired to an Ethernet network using one of the device’s four gigabit Ethernet ports; the three remaining ports then act as a switch. The device delivered wireless TCP/IP throughput of 19.2 Mb/sec at close range (10 feet with no walls separating the AP and our wireless client), 14.9 Mb/sec at with the client 18 feet away and with one wall in between, and 12.7 Mb/sec with the client 30 feet away and with two walls in between.

So if you need a wireless bridge to enable wired clients to connect to your wireless network, we recommend steering clear of the DAP-1522. If, on the other hand, you’re interested in adding a wireless access point and a gigabit switch to a room that’s hardwired to your network, the DAP-1522 is worth a look.

But we also recommend that you examine Trendnet’s much cheaper TEW-637AP. It’s not a wireless bridge, and it lacks several access-point features that the DAP-1522 offers (the TEW-637AP operates only on the 2.4GHz band, and it doesn’t have an integrated switch), but Trendnet’s device is street-priced $60 lower than D-Link’s.

Trendnet TV-IP422W IP Camera

Michael Brown — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 09:30:51 -0500

Trendnet’s TV-IP422W wireless IP camera reminds us of the Zonet ZVC7630W camera we reviewed a few months back. Both cameras have night vision, both offer the same fuzzy video at VGA resolution (640x480), and both use the same unintuitive software. Trendet’s camera costs about $50 more, but it offers two important features that Zonet’s doesn’t: motorized pan and tilt.

The pan and tilt functions enable one camera to cover much more area, which can reduce the total number of cameras you need to deploy. The TV-IP422W can pan in a 330-degree arc, tilt up 90 degrees, and tilt down 15 degrees. Trendnet includes a kit that allows you to mount the camera to any vertical or horizontal surface, but you’ll need a weatherized enclosure if you decide to install the camera outdoors.

You can remotely control a single camera using Internet Explorer and an ActiveX control. Multi-camera management must be performed using the bundled SecurView software. Repositioning the camera’s focal point with this tool is a simple matter of clicking anywhere in the video window. You can also have the camera memorize up to eight positions, enabling you to quickly swing the lens around to focus on a specific spot. A “patrol” mode will automatically cycle the lens to each of its extreme once. Infrared LEDs encircling the lens delivers very effective night vision.

A built-in mic enables you to monitor what’s happening around the camera; plug a powered speaker into the line-level output and you have a functional intercom (in multi-camera configurations—the software supports up to 16—only one can record sound at a time).

The camera has a 100Mb/sec Ethernet interface, but it can also operate wirelessly over an 802.11g network; unfortunately, this will prevent you from operating your 802.11n network in N mode only. A motion detector can activate the recording of video sequences or snapshots; you can also schedule recordings. The software can send event-based email alerts (with still images attached), and a trigger output can be used to activate an external device, such as an alarm. There’s a USB 1.1 port for local storage or for uploading the settings the camera needs to connect to your Wi-Fi network.

You can access the cameras remotely, too (i.e., over the Internet or on a cell phone that supports the 3GPP specification), but if your broadband ISP uses dynamic IP addressing, as most do, you’ll need to sign up with a dynamic DNS hosting service (establishing a unique hostname for each) and configure your router for port forwarding to make this work. And then you’ll need to open a separate browser window to view each camera.

We really dig the Trendnet TV-IP422W’s pan/tilt and intercom features, but the bundled software is the same dreck that Zonet ships with its product. As we mentioned in our Zonet review, Logitech’s Wi-Life camera system has far superior software, particularly in the areas of remote management and multi-camera support; that’s the one reason we remain so enchanted with Wi-Life.

Canary Wireless Hot Spotter HS-20

Gordon Mah Ung — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:00:00 -0500

Canary Wireless was the first out with a usable Wi-Fi network spotter. We say usable because we’ve seen all manner of gimmicky, useless devices that couldn’t spot a Wi-Fi network if they were hit by a semi full of them.

Finding a network has never been a problem for Canary’s Hot Spotter; this second-generation product sports an upgraded display, has better sensitivity, and is able to detect more networks. This unit can also spot some 802.11n access points in addition to 802.11b and 11g signals. However, the Hot Spotter is restricted to the 2.4GHz band, so access points operating in the 5GHz spectrum won’t be spotted, nor will 802.11a networks.

The three-line LCD displays the spotted SSID, what channel it’s on, its speed, whether it’s secure or not, and, if applicable, what security mode is being used. The unit, for example, easily found the Cisco access points in our building and the CCX extensions in use (it can ID WEP, WPA, WPA2 as well as CCX).

The Hot Spotter is pretty dummy-proof. Hit the power button and the device scans and displays available networks. You then scroll through the access points using two buttons on the side of the device. We’re really not into rechargeable batteries these days in gadgets since they invariably seem to die out right when they’re needed. Fortunately, the HS-20 operates on a pair of AAA cells that can easily be swapped out. The downers? For one, the unit times out far too quickly. It stays on for 30 seconds, but somehow, 30 seconds isn’t what it used to be. We’d prefer the unit stay on a full minute.

While 802.11a would be nice, the biggest ding against the HS-20 is that most geeks already have free Wi-Fi spotters—their smartphones. Any smartphone worth its weight has built-in Wi-Fi and a pretty capable scanner to boot.

However, for those who don’t have a Wi-Fi-enabled smartphone and want a way to find a signal before breaking out their big notebook PCs, the Canary Wireless Hot Spotter HS-20 is worth a sniff.