Review Details

4-Port USB to Serial Adapter COM Retention FTDI Chipset 920K Baud Rate

Product Review (submitted on November 2, 2013):

In short, the GearMo 4-port serial adapter ROCKS!

I am a professional network engineer and often need to connect to serial console ports on routers, switches, firewalls and more. An RS232 serial connection is pretty much the industry standard for a local console connection to these devices. Since it's common for me to be working on several devices at once -- often trying to make coordinated changes on 2 or 4 devices that must be executed with relatively precise timing -- this product seemed like a better option than moving my console cable back and forth between devices.

The 36" cables are a bit bulky when coiled up but the spare length for connections is great when working in a data center rack. The FTDI chipset retains its COM port assignment on Windows after reboots and regardless of which USB port the adapter is connected to -- an enormous improvement over the PL2303 chipset which always changes its COM port assignment. Each RS232 port is embossed with a number (1-4) that indicates which port it is. I mapped these to COM11-14 on my system so I could make an easy mental association with the COM port to the physical connector.

This item also works reliably in Mac and Linux OSes. I've been strongly considering building a battery-powered RaspberryPi terminal server with one or two of these to provide an easy-to-access WiFi-connected terminal server.