Thinkpads Forum

If I put a T400 inside a 2504 Mini Docking Station, will I have TWO usable Ethernet ports working independently form each-other?
I wouldn't want to get it and then find out they can't work both at the same time, because is just an extension od the built-in laptop port.

I am thinking of using such a combination as pfSense firewall and I would need at least two NICs to make it work (I might also add a third on in a PCMCIA slot might be also applied).

No, you cannot use both (internal and dock) ports simultaneously. Mini Dock does not contain a NIC. Between (internal and dock) ports, only one at a time is active.

Darn it.
Is there any dock that would have a full additional NIC functionality which could be used at the same time as laptop's NIC?

Lenovo USB 2.0 Port Replicator with Digital Video (0A33942) has an ethernet port, which might work separately (via USB).
https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/documents/migr-76983

Or just use a simple USB to Ethernet adapter. No need to get a whole dock for this one feature.

Eh... The only point of getting a dock is to NOT use USB NICs.
If there is no dock option, I will have to resort to a PCMCIA ethernet card.

Lockheed wrote:If there is no dock option, I will have to resort to a PCMCIA ethernet card.

Which is going to be worse than USB.

Use ExpressCard.

Use full Advanced Dock, and use ExpressCard, to yield two additional NICs.

dr_st wrote:

Lockheed wrote:If there is no dock option, I will have to resort to a PCMCIA ethernet card.

Which is going to be worse than USB.

Care to elaborate? By all accounts I have found over the last few years, PCMCIA is incomparably superior to USB as far as ethernet NICs go (also eSATA and other uses, but that's not the topic here).

Lockheed wrote:Care to elaborate? By all accounts I have found over the last few years, PCMCIA is incomparably superior to USB as far as ethernet NICs go (also eSATA and other uses, but that's not the topic here).

Care to share these accounts?

First of all, I am sure that by PCMCIA you mean "CardBus". Because PCMCIA itself is an old, slow and obsolete bus.

CardBus itself is PCI, which has advantages and disadvantages over USB. In theory, the maximum bandwidth is higher. In practice, it may depend on other system factors.

On a laptop such as the T400, where there is no native PCI bus, and the CardBus is implemented via a PCIe-to-PCI bridge, you can be sure that no other devices will share the bus (so you can enjoy the full bandwidth), but there are other factors in play, such as the performance of the PCIe-to-PCI bridge and the CardBus bridge itself.

Given the option to use the ExpressCard which is native PCIe, I'd choose that any day.

Yes, I meant CardBus, indeed.

The accounts of PCMCIA/CardBus being superior to USB NICs you can find all over pfSense forums. And I would imagine they know their stuff.
Interestingly, on those forums, ExpressCard NICs are considered inferior to CardBus NICs, too. Might be a FreeBSD specific environment.