j5create JUC500 Data, Keyboard, and Mouse Sharing/Transfer USB 3.0 Cable Transfer Data Between Mac and Windows [Wormhole Switch]

Excellent product. The first thing I did before jumping into anything was upgrade the firmware on the "switch" side of the USB adapter, which btw took about 5 minutes. The adapter itself has a read-only drive where the "Wormhole Switch" application software was located. Once I've had the firmware updated and drivers installed on both computers, it operated smooth as butter from there. The KVM part worked flawlessly. My setup for the transfer speed test. Computer 1 ------------------ CPU: AMD FX-8350 RAM: 16GB DDR3 1333Mhz RAM HDD: Sandisk X110 256GB SSD. Data ports: USB 3.0 Super Speed (dark blue colored, if it's not blue it's not USB 3.0) Data bridge device: USB 3.0 Wormhole Switch Cable JUC500. Operating System: Windows 7 Professional x64. Computer 2 - Dell Inpsiron 15R Special Edition Laptop CPU: Core i7-3632QM RAM: 16GB DDR3 1600Mhz HDD: Samsung 850 PRO 256GB SSD. Operating System: Windows 7 Profession x64. File size: Generated a 10GB Truecrypt dummy file. Method of transfer: File Shuttle program and Drag and Desktop drag-and-drop. File transfer speed average: 123MB/s (984 megabits per second) Peak transfer speed: 192MB/s (1.53 gigabits per second) Total time to transfer a 10GB file: 81 seconds Overall I'm very satisfied! The file transfer speed easily tops my 1 gigabit Ethernet connection, which tops out at around 100-112MB/s (800-900 megabits per second). If you did everything correctly i.e. updated firmware for windows 7/8.1/10, then installed drivers on both computers, then you won't have any problems. As for MACs I have no idea, y'all are on your own. If you want top speeds via USB 3.0 protocol, you need to have SSDs on both computers. Spindle hard drives top out at 75MB/s (600 megabits per second) after its built-in disk cache has been saturated, so don't let the fast initial speed fool you on hard disk drives. If you want top speed USB 3.0, get SSDs. ================================================================================================ Update: November 16, 2015. I noticed that in Windows 7 Professional x64 the drivers created an "MCT 7500 NDIS 6.0" miniport connection at 5Gbps which came with an IP address. I didn't like the preconfigured IP address so I manually changed the IP addresses from the PC and Laptop to 192.168.137.2 and 192.168.137.1, respectively. I pinged the other computer from my PC using command prompt and got <1ms pings, and yes, I disabled my LAN connection making sure that the ping was ONLY going through the USB 3.0 NDIS emulated ports/bridge. I even went a step further and shared the gigabit LAN connection to the internet via ICS on the Laptop side with it's USB 3.0 that's directly connected to my PC and now I have internet connection. As for throughput, I still got around 157.8MB/s (1.233Gbit/s), which is still way better than my gigabit ethernet connection. ================================================================================================ Update: November 28, 2015. I seem to get consistent 150-161MByte/s (1,200-1,300Mbit/s) thoughput between two host computers with SSDs. Both of my computers have SSDs capable of 400+MB/s speed according to Crystal Mark 5.0.2 x64 bit edition. I wonder if get another JUC500 and perform an LACP-like bonded connection I'd get (in theory) 300-400MB/s (2,400-3,200Mbit/s), which would put me about 48-64% of the total bandwidth that USB 3.0 has to offer at 5,000Mbit/s (4,800Mbit/s with overhead).

I know there are some kinks in this setup, however for last 7 years this is the only thing that has worked for me. I work across machines that are on separate VPN and there is nothing else that has worked for me. I have used both USB 2.0 and 3.0. Below are few suggestions, please add yours in comments or provide link to them in comments. - Do not run directly from mounted CD drive copy to folder or go online and get latest version and run from HD/NVMe. You may disable auto play for it all together. - Run as administrator. - Make sure to plug in USB 3.0 port and avoid USB hub for troubleshooting. - Turn off/Kill Logitech flow or similar programs that alter mouse/keyboard behavior for troubleshooting.

To clarify what this product actually does: A) Creates a network connection between two PCs over USB 3.0. This. Is. Awesome! (when it works) B) Also allows the ability to control the other PC's keyboard and mouse input from a single keyboard/mouse in a KVM-ish/LogMeIn-ish way by moving the mouse cursor to the right of the host PC. Files can also be dragged and dropped between PCs (also pretty cool), and doesn't seem to actually use the TCP/IP connection established in A) above (or at least it doesn't show any network activity in Task Manager when transferring files through the drag-and-drop method). The reason I'm deducting two stars is because of driver instability. I've had the driver Blue-Screen Windows 8.1 and hard-freeze Windows 7 multiple times. This could be from USB 3.0 power draw--when I used USB 3.0 powered hubs on both PCs, things were a lot more stable. Transferring files using Method B) only exacerbates the instability--this is when you're most likely to get a BSOD or hard freeze. To reduce the chance of instability, use Method A) and transfer through a file share. As for actual speeds? Well you're really only going to see the benefit if you're not bottlenecked by anything else (like mechanical storage). I would recommend this cable only if you want the convenience of drag and drop, have additional USB 3.0 hubs to offset power issues, and are okay with the occasional BSOD or hard freeze. If you're buying this for super-high speed file transfers, you better have SSDs. Otherwise just stick to Gigabit Ethernet. j5create: If you want a more positive review, fix your drivers and/or this product's power draw! Better yet, add a Y-cable to one or both ends to help with power issues! UPDATE: 7/2/2015: I tried Method A to do Hyper-V VM live migrations between two servers that have USB 3.0 cards in them. Transfer speed hovers between 1.1 and 1.4 Gbps, which is nice! The important part is that it's STABLE! I thought about adding a star to the review, but since this product is advertised to do Method B, and it still has BSODs, disconnects, etc. with that, I'm keeping it at 3 stars.

Absolute piece of junk. I tried this in a Windows to Windows setup. The drivers crashed constantly, and I never got it working, even after downloading all available Windows and driver updates. It even caused my laptop to blue-screen, and I haven't seen that in probably two years.

Critical: you must have admin rights on the two machines you are connecting this to. I do not know why, there are also a lot of notifications caused by this and the software splash screen pops up from time to time. I turned off the notifications to remove the aggressive sound. Otherwise it works fine. Note: you can copy files or folder between the 2 machines using a « file shuttle » interface (a kind of simplified File Explorer. No drag and drop between the machines. But it works fine.