The two LEDs on the USB 2.0 10/100/1000 adapter … the Link LED is solid green and my router does report being connected at 1.0Gbps/FULL. The Activity LED is orange, is that normal or should it also be green? Thanks.
Hi Howard,
Thanks for posting and very glad you’re happy with the product!
The activity LED is orange just to distinguish it from the green link LED – so what you’re seeing is totally normal, and the orange color doesn’t signal any problem at all! As you’d expect, when the activity LED is blinking, you know traffic is going over the wire. Very helpful for debugging problems (most commonly that the user is getting no network access, yet the LED is blinking so we know the adapter is talking to the router – then we know it’s a higher-level TCP/IP config issue).
Good to ask about the color though, understandable. Thanks again!
Bernie
Thanks! That is what I assumed … but my router has a different LED-color scheme and I wanted to confirm. I did not see any reference to the LED-color for the activity light in the manual that came with the device.
Another question: I realize that since USB 2.0 is limited to 480Mbps, that I should not be getting true “Gigabit” speeds. However, not only does my router report that I am connected at 1.0Gbps, which I expected … but Windows 7 also reports that I am connected at 1.0Gbps! With Wi-Fi, even if I have a 130Mbps “pipe,” the connection speeds vary and get reported as 130, 117, 104, 78 and so forth depending on distance from the router, etc. I would think that at most, Windows would only see a connection of 480Mbps. Thoughts?
I also experienced a BSOD last evening – the first time ever on this system in over a year. My first thought was the USB Gigabit port, however it has since not repeated under the same and more strenuous conditions. Are there any issues involving BSODs that I should be aware of? I was surprised by the BSOD, so I didn’t have a change to write down the code. However, from what I do remember, the device listed was not one of the drivers for the plugable device. I will post again if I get another BSOD.
Yea - don’t trust Windows’ report of gigabit speeds. It says 1Gbps because it’s a gigabit chipset, but USB 2.0’s bottleneck of 480Mbps theoretical (~230Mbps practical) will definitely keep you from getting full gigabit speeds in practice.
(actually even on an internal NIC you’ll not get full gigabit either)
We don’t know of any BSOD issues, but if you do ever hit one, look for a new .dmp file in \windows\minidump and email the latest to support@plugable.com – we’d like to take a look to make sure it’s not any driver running on the chipsets we use, which is causing the problem.
Thanks!
Bernie
Interesting. I actually have a Dell Optiplex 755 with a 82566DM-2 on board NIC, which is supposed to be Gigabit. I upgraded the box to Win7x64 (came with XP, was certified for Vista) well before having a Gigabit router. It would never connect at Gigabit despite working with numerous drivers. (Also tried plugging the computer directly into the modem vs. the router, which also has Gigabit ports, and still only connected at 100, so it is definitely an issue with the NIC.) While I still might go and put a “proper” NIC in at some point, this seemed like a compelling product to try. Aside from the BSOD (which I am not 100% sure was related to the new hardware), I have been very pleased so far. I use this system as a local file backup to my laptop, and transfer about 30GB of data every day. Raw throughput aside, I can tell you that it has speed up the transfers by 2-3X measured by a stopwatch. Not sure how much better I could do with an internal Gigabit NIC. Also running 30x5 internet and use Skype/ooVoo all day. Thus far, no issues at all.
BSOD … there was nothing in the minidump folder, but if it happens again I will send along.