Home > Consumer Reviews > Linksys EFAH08W EtherFast 8-Port 10/100 Auto-Sensing Hub (Desktop)

First of all, the current picture of a black hub is mistaken - the box looks like the other current linksys routers / hubs with the bright blue and black plastic box design.

That having been said, this hub worked perfectly out of the box. It is used to network among machines running Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Linux, using a variety of ethernet cards (3Com, Linksys, NetGear). It has been used several weeks now without a problem. Setup took minutes!

Besides this item, I have bought and used several Linksys products before, including several 4-port hubs, a 4-port router, PC network cards and a laptop card. All of these have worked flawlessly with the other network equipment I have used. In some cases they replaced an item that cost 3-6 times more yet did not work as well!

I noticed some other users have had issues with this product, so here are a few pointers about networking that might help:

1) Hubs allow computers to talk to connect to each other on a local network. All a hub does is allow a computer which is set up to be on the network to talk to another computer.

2) To create a local network that can talk to the internet, you either need to buy an IP address for every machine and use a hub, or use a router to allow multiple computers on the internal network to look to anyone on the internet as having a single IP address. (Don't forget the cable/DSL connection & modem.)

3) The maximum speed that the hub supports may be 100 Mbps, but the speed is limited by the speed of the ethernet card as well! Some ethernet cards are only rated for 10Mbps - so that is the maximum connection speed you'll get using them.

Linksys has made a really high quality yet affordable hub with this model. I was able to just take it out of the box and easily networked my 3 pc's and 1 laptop with ease. The documentation provided was easy to understand. As a side note the Linksys home page is full of "how-to" information for the beginner as well as pretty innovative stuff for the more advanced user (like how to share your cable modem with this particular hub to all your PC's without paying for extra IP addresses to the cable company). As a technician I totally recommend this hub to any who have a need for speed.

Very simple to set up, just plug in the power, and plug in each network cable. Great for a small, or home office where you have a mix of 10 and 100 Mbps computers.

I have 1 computer at 10 Mbps, a cable modem router, and 5 other computers at 100 Mbps, and everything works great.

The Linksys HUB is an awesome performer. It's autosensing capabilites make local LAN and WAN traffic fly!

Just make sure the power supply is right side up(Rubber dots down) There are almost invisible vent slits on the top of the little box and mine was upside down melted! Tried to get a new one form Mfr, even faxed a picture of the adapter but still sent me the wrong one... will see how it goes still waiting.

But overall, for the four months that it did work it was awesome! Just plug and go.

I run a NT 4.0 server at home (getting ready to upgrade to 2000 server) with 4 Win98, 1 NT 4.0 and 1 Win2000 Pro workstations plus a 3 port print server. I used it for about 2 weeks and upgraded to a full duplex switch. As long as I was playing games with my kids or working with small files it was great. But when it came to working with massive files (firewire video capture in the GB range) or transferring large quantities of small files (photo albums), the half duplex mode was just too slow. The full duplex switch I upgraded too speeded things up considerably but at 3 times cost.