Why I buy this one ?
- Allows computers to share USB external hard drives, printers, scanners and media readers wirelessly
- Easy 3-minute setup
- Compatible with all wireless routers (router not included)
- 3-year Belkin warranty
- Network Hub gives network computers wireless access to up to 15 USB devices

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What our customer's say!

"I love this magic black box", We have three computers, two printers, and one external hard drive for backing up computers, all plugged into the Belkin Hub. The Hub is plugged into a wireless router. So wirelessly we can all print and backup files. For large file transfers such as a few hundred pictures or a lots of songs we hook the hard drive directly to the computer. But for printer sharing and retrieving documents from the hard drive the Belkin usb hub is a miracle machine.

The install was very easy, just put the disk in each computer then plugged the usb hub into our wireless router and hooked up the printers and hard drive and your done.

The only little downfall is every now and then when printing a large files such as one hundred page documents sometimes the belkin hub does not automatically disconnect from the computer so you need to open the hub controller program on the computer and click the "disconnect" box. But it is easy and simple.

Works great, lasts long time!

"Works as advertised", On of the things that appealed to me about the Belkin F5L009 network hub was that it *seemed* to match my Airport Extreme wireless router in size and shape, such that I was hoping to stack the two together on my "network shelf" at home. Though the specs indicated that the F5L009 was larger than the Airport, I took a gamble and ordered it anyway. It was a perfect match!

The main reason I wanted this product was so I could run printer utilities that didn't work against printers connected directly to the Airport. For that it worked exactly as advertised!

Now all I need is a matching cable modem.

"I'm truly wireless =)", Belkin F5L009 5-Port Network USB Hub
I, too, have been looking for this product for a while, and the payoff couldn't be more sweet. I am not connected to anything right now, but am able to use my wireless mouse, 2 hard drives, the Western Digital My Book Essential 750GB, and the Toshiba Portable USB 2.0 320GB, (which is USB powered), my OfficeJet 6100, and my Microsoft Wireless Keyboard 6000. It was simple enough to connect, but Windows Firewall must not be set to block all incoming connections. After I figured that out, it was a breeze. You plug a device in to the USB hub, and you hear the windows plug and play connect sound. Also, the hub is fast enough to play movies off of the Toshiba USB powered hard drive. Not HD movies, but the regular 700mb kind.

One gripe- I just purchased the Logitech Clearchat Wireless, and the as not fast enough. The sound was choppy on an MP3 and I didnt even try to dictate to Dragon Naturally Speaking 10. But other than that, it does what it says, and it is glorious.

Wait, it does work with the clearchat, I just had to use the USB dongle dock, and it works fine, no choppiness or anything. Have yet to test it with Dragon, but will know in a little bit. Would change my review to a 5 now but I can't seem to edit the rating.

***UPDATE***
Its fast enough to stream 1080p HD H264 Movies. I know, you think I'm lying. I transfer at 1.3MB/s while watching though on a regular WRT54G. It's AMAZING!

"Excellent Product!", I needed to connect 3 printers to my wireless router in order to be able to print from any of the 4 computers connected to my wireless network, without having to leave turned on a computer to share the printers. I am using the Belkin F5L009 5-Port Network USB Hub to do that, and it is working great!

I have this Belkin USB Hub connected to my Linksys WRT54GS Wireless G Router with Speedbooster. I have 3 printers connected to the Belkin USB Hub: a Cannon MP 830, an Epson PictureMate Deluxe, and an HP Laserjet 1200 Series. For the HP LaserJet printer I am using a "Gigaware USB-A to Centronics Parallel Printer" cable. I have 4 Dell computers connected to the Linksys wireless router: a desktop and a notebook using Windows XP Professional, and 2 notebooks using Windows Vista Home Premium.

The Belkin USB Hub allowed me to configure it in such a way that the computers automatically connect and disconnect from the printers when printing. In order to use the scanner on the Cannon MP 830 I cannot use the "automatic connection" option. But connecting and disconnecting while scanning is very easy using the USB Hub Control Center, and it works pretty good.

I definitely recommend this Belkin USB Hub if you need to connect one or more computers to one or more printers! It allows me to print from any computer on my wireless network without having to leave a computer turned on to share printers.

"Corrupted my hard drive (OS X)", This may very well be an isolated case, but I happily unpacked my Belkin Network USB HUB after 2 months of it sitting in the packaging. I successfully plugged in a USB scanner and did some remote scanning. Taking it to the next level of wireless, I moved my hard drive over.

I plugged it in. Everything worked (kind of) fine. I could access the disk, but playing files in iTunes resulted in some skipping. Finally frustrated with the skipping, I went to plug the external hard drive directly into my computer.

It didn't show up.

I plugged it back into the USB Hub. It still didn't show up. I opened Disk Utility only to have it tell me the entire drive was corrupt. I called Belkin support and after being escalated to Level 2 support, I was told that "The drive is corrupted, sorry".

That was it. No trying to troubleshoot. No offers of goodwill to recover the data on the drive. Just a flat-out tough luck.

Like I said, this may very well be an isolated incident... But I'll never, ever plug anything into that Belkin Network USB Hub again.

Read this reviews before You buy...

"Decent Value", As long as you get a really good price, which I did through Amazon, then this is a good purchase, but only for certain situations.
It connects easily enough. The software installed on both XP and Vista without any problems.
The main problem with it is that only one user can access a printer or hard drive connected to it at a time. I've been connecting print servers for years and this is a new limitation to me. Of course, this isn't really meant to be a print server and it does have a connect and disconnect while printing option.
Belkin's solution is to allow the users to send a request to the machine that has the equipment you want to use tied up and ask them to get to disconnect using the Belkin interface, which is also very easy to use, by the way.
In my situation this is OK because most of the user's are on laptops, log on sporadically, and always disconnect when finished.
Desktop workstations present a problem though because a user can log on, attach to the printer or hard drive, and then walk off, rendering the requests for them to detach worthless. There isn't a forced disconnect.
In a large network or one where users are not required to log off when leaving their workstation this characteristic of the Belkin F5L009 5 Port Hub can be a major headache.
Other than that, it has worked flawlessly and set up was a breeze.
I also like the look and size of it. With our change to VM servers and Wi-Fi we have greatly reduced our hardware footprint and this little piece of equipment fits right in.
Since my users are mostly laptops that log in for short bursts and rarely print, attaching a large hard drive and a couple of printers was an inexpensive alternative to a NAS and print servers (maybe not better, but cheaper). Multiple users do tie up the hard drive and throughput seems a little slow and can hang on large files movements.
I decided on this configuration because the hub was $70 and I found 500G Western Digital hard drives for under $100 (The price of larger drives is dropping also). Pretty cheap versus just the cost of WI-FI print servers or converting to WI-FI enabled printers- and that doesn't address the cost of the storage. Of course, this storage area is just used for user and temporary files and doesn't replace the server files and adequate back-up. (There are a lot of music and video files that aren't allowed on the server and don't get backed up.)
So, to ramble on, my point is that while this is certainly not appropriate for an enterprise situation or even one where the printer/hard drive to workstation ratio is too great, I think anyone in a small or home network could consider this hub as a viable solution. If for nothing else, the lack of user training and maintenance required as well as the minimal amount of time it takes to get everything up and running are big bonuses.
Summary: This piece of equipment works well, but the type of environment where it can be productively and efficiently used is limited.




"This works if you are lucky to have compatible hardware", I have to say that I thought this product was just what I needed. I connected my HP scanner, Canon printer, and 2 Maxtor One Touch II hard drives to it. The scanner and printer work beautifully. The hard drives, not so beautifully. Both hard drives are recognized and Windows can read and write to them. The issue that I have been experiencing is that after transferring some data (could be as little as 20 megs or as much as 20 gigs) the drive will simply stop responding. When this happens Windows Explorer freezes up waiting on the hard drive. The only way to get it to recover is to end task the Connect.exe application or reboot the system. This product is far from ready for the market and I would definitely consider it a lemon. After trying it on 2 different laptops and exchanging what I thought was a bad unit I have given up on trying to make this work. Tech support was totally useless in resolving this issue. After updating the driver and disabling Windows Firewall I still see the same issue. I would not recommend purchasing this for anything other than sharing a printer or scanner and maybe a low-usage USB drive. If you want to actually transfer data to a USB drive, this product is not for you.

"Works well here", I was concerned about getting this because other reviews said it didn't work with WD MyBook Hard Drives. Since that would have been a bonus for me and what I really needed was to make my scanner accessible to my wireless laptop, I gave this a try.

I am happy to say that it hooked up very easily, just followed the instructions. It had software version 1.4 already so no upgrade needed. It recognized my scanner right away along with an external Zip drive and to my surprise and delight the WD MyBook Essential 250g hard drive! I haven't had much time to experiment ( a couple days) and I will report back if things change but everything is working as advertised and I am able to access it all from my laptop no problem. Please NOTE: This unit is NOT wireless but I have it hooked up to my wireless network and that is why I can connect wirelessly to these things.

The other note is that while things are all working well, transferring data to/from the WD MyBook Hard Drive is NOT fast. It is working without problem but it takes some time. For my back up purposes it is fine.

"Exceeded my expectations", All in all, I'm pleased. It's not perfect, but it works much more smoothly than I expected. However, I knew before purchasing that it is not wireless, and is not really a print server.

I have it connected to:
Samsung 1430 printer
Iomega 33748 desktop hard drive
Canon BJC-2100
Dell 1600n multi-function printer/scanner/copier/fax (this is supposed to be a network MFP, but the network scanning is a joke)

So far I've only tested it with 2 computers at once, one XP, the other Vista.

Setup was pretty easy. There is no setup to do on the appliance at all; just plug it in to power, your network, and some USB devices. It gets an IP address from DHCP and detects what devices are connected to it. Every computer that wants to use it, though, has to have the "Hub Control Center" installed. It's a simple install that also installs whatever shim it is that convinces Windows you have equipment connected to a USB port when it's really on the network.

On the computer that uses the Windows built-in firewall, after the setup program ran, I was in business. I did have to manually set up a rule on one computer's BitDefender firewall to allow incoming traffic from the hub. The manual was pretty clear on what needed to be done, with step-by-step instructions for the most popular firewalls (although not for BitDefender).

I bought this thing in order to share the above devices, so I set the printers up to connect only when needed. That option is only for printers, and only seems to work for printing. The external hard drive I set to manually connect. I set the 1600n MFP to connect only when needed, which works for the printing function, but I have to manually connect to scan.

Compatibility with my hardware:
Samsung 1430
It works just fine with one problem: if I turn off the printer, then later turn it back on, the hub doesn't detect that it's back, and says the printer is "unavailable." If I unplug, then replug the USB cable, it comes right back up. Annoying, but not a big issue.

Canon BJC-2100
It works fine, connecting and disconnecting automatically. There is one very odd behavior. With some files, the print job completes, but for some reason the job remains in the queue. The most peculiar thing is that if you send other print jobs, they will go through, ignoring the leftover job ahead of them. So everything works fine, but if you open up the print queue, you see this long queue of phantom jobs, which sit there until deleted.

Dell 1600n
The print part works fine, but since the 1600n comes with a print server, it's not all that useful. It is very useful for scanning. I have to manually connect to the 1600n in order for the scan to work, but that only requires three clicks. And if you weren't going to share the 1600n scanner, you could just set your computer to stay connected all the time.

Iomega 33748
Again I have to connect manually when I want to use it, but I could choose to always be connected if I weren't sharing it. Otherwise it seems to work fine.

I did a little speed testing, and while small files (10 MB or less) copy in 30 seconds or so, which is acceptable, when I copied a 1.3 GB file, it took about 20 minutes. During that time, my computer was much less responsive, though I couldn't find any reason for it (CPU and HD usage stayed below 25%). The same file took only 1 minute when the drive was plugged directly into my computer.


Sharing resources:
I haven't done much testing of this, but when I print simultaneously to the Samsung ML-1430, the hub handles the contention nicely, automatically connecting the first computer, and on the second computer showing that the device is connected to another computer, then disconnecting the first computer when that print job is done, and automatically connecting the second computer and completing the print job.

If one user is connected to the external HD, I can see that in the Hub Control Center, and can "Request Use" of the hardware. A little text message pops up on the connected computer, and then if the connected computer disconnects, the requesting computer can manually connect.


One of the weirdest things about it is that they tout its wireless ability (the box has the word "wireless" on it at least 11 times), but it has only a 10/100BaseTX port, so in order to get wireless access, you have to connect it to a wireless access point or router, not included (which is clear if you read the whole box).

The box also touts it as "the industry's 1st reliable print server" even though it isn't a print server. It does seem to be a reliable way to share printers, though, so it does the same job as a print server. The difference is that the print queues are maintained on the desktops and contend for the printer, instead of going into a central queue on the print server.

"Freezes Windows-based computers as well, can't share hard drives, not wireless...what more do you need to know?", Belkin, I understand you tried to solve a big problem with this product. Problem is...well...it doesn't work! Why this product is still on the market is amazing to me, because I have yet to meet anyone who loves this, or read a completely positive review of the Belkin Networked USB Hub. It's not truly wireless (false advertising, IMHO), and freezes up your computer when you connect an external hard drive to it to use over a wireless network. That's right, Mac users, it's not just your systems. Us PC'ers are feeling the pain, too. Conclusion: please save your money, and wait it out for a product that can actually do what this product claims!