USB Hub?

What are USB hubs used for? What are good ways to use one? Just
curious. IE Keyboard receiver and printer to same hub?
Thanks
xxxxx

On 5/1/2020 8:06 AM, wrote:
What are USB hubs used for? What are good ways to use one? Just
curious. IE Keyboard receiver and printer to same hub?
Thanks
xxxxx



Just a way to add more USB slots

On Fri, 1 May 2020 11:09:49 -0500, philo wrote:

On 5/1/2020 8:06 AM, wrote:
What are USB hubs used for? What are good ways to use one? Just
curious. IE Keyboard receiver and printer to same hub?
Thanks
xxxxx



Just a way to add more USB slots

I tried conecting some USB devices to a 7-port hub I sprung ## for. I
find the printer I have works fine with the keyboard/mouse receiver,
but an external hard drive does not. The mouse or keyboard will not
function and the hard drive is not recognized. No surpriise really.
thanx
xxxxx

philo wrote:
On 5/1/2020 8:06 AM, wrote:
What are USB hubs used for? What are good ways to use one? Just
curious. IE Keyboard receiver and printer to same hub?
Thanks
xxxxx



Just a way to add more USB slots

With the understanding that you are sharing the
bandwidth, and are not "making something from nothing".

If you put 127 web cams off one computer port using
hubs, and start capturing video from all of them, none
will have a nice picture. The USB2 port does a kind of
polling, and with VBR sources, will try to give them
a fair share each. With no guarantees of a particularly
good outcome.

One-port hubs can be used as "amplifiers" or "line regenerators".

The most hubs you can have in a row is five or so. On computers
for the last ten years or so, the Intel Southbridge has a hub
in its architecture, and the end result of that bad decision,
is one less line regeneration on the outside. The "Intel
Southbridge wastes a hub".

At 15 feet per active cable, times four hubs, you could
extend a USB signal 60 feet. I have three of those cables,
and sometimes run a cable out to the kitchen. But that
method doesn't give enough reach for more extravagant
extension. I can run the inkjet in the kitchen if I want
(as there's no room in the computer room to plop down the
inkjet). And strangely, there's enough power left on the
end of three cables, to run my little webcam. I
wasn't expecting that to work, but it did. I think I can
reach the front room window, and plop the webcam up in the window
and watch for the delivery van.

As for the multiport hubs, I don't own a single one of those.
Shocking, really. How lazy can you get ?

And for USB3, I'm not really sure what the hub situation
is like. I wouldn't want to have to solve the extension
problem for USB3, because I don't think it goes all that
far. Couldn't reach the kitchen in that case.

For a price, you can do just about anything, and with
fiber optics, I bet the USB3 could be run out to the
back yard (for a thousand bucks). The trick with
real ($$$) extenders, is using a non-USB protocol in the
extension cable.

Paul

wrote:
On Fri, 1 May 2020 11:09:49 -0500, philo wrote:

On 5/1/2020 8:06 AM, wrote:
What are USB hubs used for? What are good ways to use one? Just
curious. IE Keyboard receiver and printer to same hub?
Thanks
xxxxx


Just a way to add more USB slots

I tried conecting some USB devices to a 7-port hub I sprung ## for. I
find the printer I have works fine with the keyboard/mouse receiver,
but an external hard drive does not. The mouse or keyboard will not
function and the hard drive is not recognized. No surpriise really.
thanx
xxxxx

You need power for that.

See if the 7-port hub has a "barrel jack" on the side.
There are two common jack sizes (out of at least fifteen
barrel connector standards). You'd probably want a 5V @ 2A
adapter as a minimum, to ensure the hard drive spins up
nicely. And this assumes the hub does not have "excessive"
fusing inside, which could cut off the power to the
hard drive.

In your current situation, it's even possible the fuse opened
on the computer USB port, depriving the hub of all bus power
while the fuse was open. The computer uses stuff like Polyfuses,
which recover when the electrical load is removed.

If a seven port hub had seven 500mA electrical loads on it,
that would be a total of 5V @ 3.5 amps loading. You can provide
such a hefty adapter if you want, but as the power goes up,
the selection will be different. For example, perhaps
an adapter product for an RPi 4 would have the amps for that.
But on a typical day, you don't really need the full 3.5A of
capacity. The loading will be a lot less. I picked the 2 amp
number, to try to have some headroom for a single hard drive
to spin up (it needs 1 amp for ten seconds).

Paul

Paul wrote:

wrote:
On Fri, 1 May 2020 11:09:49 -0500, philo wrote:

On 5/1/2020 8:06 AM, wrote:
What are USB hubs used for? What are good ways to use one?
Just curious. IE Keyboard receiver and printer to same hub?
Thanks
xxxxx


Just a way to add more USB slots

I tried conecting some USB devices to a 7-port hub I sprung ## for.
I find the printer I have works fine with the keyboard/mouse
receiver, but an external hard drive does not. The mouse or
keyboard will not function and the hard drive is not recognized.
No surpriise really. thanx
xxxxx

You need power for that.

See if the 7-port hub has a "barrel jack" on the side.
There are two common jack sizes (out of at least fifteen
barrel connector standards). You'd probably want a 5V @ 2A
adapter as a minimum, to ensure the hard drive spins up
nicely. And this assumes the hub does not have "excessive"
fusing inside, which could cut off the power to the
hard drive.

In your current situation, it's even possible the fuse opened
on the computer USB port, depriving the hub of all bus power
while the fuse was open. The computer uses stuff like Polyfuses,
which recover when the electrical load is removed.

If a seven port hub had seven 500mA electrical loads on it,
that would be a total of 5V @ 3.5 amps loading. You can provide
such a hefty adapter if you want, but as the power goes up,
the selection will be different. For example, perhaps
an adapter product for an RPi 4 would have the amps for that.
But on a typical day, you don't really need the full 3.5A of
capacity. The loading will be a lot less. I picked the 2 amp
number, to try to have some headroom for a single hard drive
to spin up (it needs 1 amp for ten seconds).

Paul

curious bystander here. Is there an USB 3 powered hub that people
agree works well? At one time, Several years ago I bought a USB 3
4-port hub with external power supply. I had so many problems using
just one external storage drive regardless of which port on the hub I
used that I just ended up throwing it away. It'd be nice to know if
there is such a brand name or manufacturer.

John

Yes wrote:


curious bystander here. Is there an USB 3 powered hub that people
agree works well? At one time, Several years ago I bought a USB 3
4-port hub with external power supply. I had so many problems using
just one external storage drive regardless of which port on the hub I
used that I just ended up throwing it away. It'd be nice to know if
there is such a brand name or manufacturer.

John

You could try the Newegg site, and list their products by "review value",
then walk through the review comments to see if people really
like it, or it's a "stuffed ballot box" kinda thing.

These days, the reviews are usually too screwed up to be of much
value, but you never know.

Amazon has reviews too, but seem to have some agreement with
Newegg, to screw them up in similar ways, to devalue the
comments.

I own neither a USB2 nor a USB3 hub.

I do have some 15 foot USB2 extender cables,
which are 1-port USB2 hubs in disguise, and
those work OK for the limited things I've tested
them with. They're too shaking looking for me to
run storage off them :-)

Getting a wall powered enclosure or wall powered
disk dock for storage devices might be one way to do it.
Some of the docks are kinda flimsy, and you have
a center of gravity problem with them. Others
have sufficient weight to stay put.

If you had a hub that supported USB3 PD 1.0 spec
or later, those would support some power functions.
That's most likely to exist on a USB-C equipped
hub. But then, you've got the "wrong connector"
for most practical purposes, and what good would
that serve ?

The industry seems to be prefaced on "the customer
does the engineering" unfortunately, and you hardly
ever run into a situation where something "just works
because you want it to".

Paul

Paul

curious bystander here. Is there an USB 3 powered hub that people
agree works well? At one time, Several years ago I bought a USB 3
4-port hub with external power supply. I had so many problems using
just one external storage drive regardless of which port on the hub I
used that I just ended up throwing it away. It'd be nice to know if
there is such a brand name or manufacturer.

John

I've been using this for over a year. Works OK.
https://www.pccasegear.com/products/...-0-powered-hub

On 7/05/2020 1:07 pm, Peter Jason wrote:

Paul

curious bystander here. Is there an USB 3 powered hub that people
agree works well? At one time, Several years ago I bought a USB 3
4-port hub with external power supply. I had so many problems using
just one external storage drive regardless of which port on the hub I
used that I just ended up throwing it away. It'd be nice to know if
there is such a brand name or manufacturer.

John

I've been using this for over a year. Works OK.
https://www.pccasegear.com/products/...-0-powered-hub

I've had mixed results with Orico gear - but mostly bad. I bought an Orico 2 x SATA USB3 'dock'
that managed to corrupt the partition of the 2TB HDD I put in it. After a bit of toing and froing
they agreed to send me another which seemed fine at first until it wasn't a week later. It
corrupted another of my 'safe backup' 2TB HDDs. I Lost a lot of data to that little venture.

I bought one of their 4 outlet USB chargers that was claimed to me capable of 6A / 30W total and 2A
per port. It got quite hot when I pulled 2 x 1.6A from it (from 2 non-adjacent ports) and it failed
shortly after.

Oh and a couple of USB3 / SD card readers turned out to be slow and ran hot compared to the no-name
Chinese things I'd hoped to replace but now am still using.

Actually now that I think of it my results aren't mixed at all, they've all been bad and ended up
in the rubbish. I stick with it for a while as they /seem/ to have good reviews and reasonable
products but my own experience is very different.
--
Shaun.

"Humans will have advanced a long, long way when religious belief has a cozy little classification
in the DSM"
David Melville

This is not an email and hasn't been checked for viruses by any half-arsed self-promoting software.

~misfit~ wrote:

On 7/05/2020 1:07 pm, Peter Jason wrote:

Paul

curious bystander here. Is there an USB 3 powered hub that people
agree works well? At one time, Several years ago I bought a USB 3
4-port hub with external power supply. I had so many problems
using just one external storage drive regardless of which port on
the hub I used that I just ended up throwing it away. It'd be
nice to know if there is such a brand name or manufacturer.

John

I've been using this for over a year. Works OK.

https://www.pccasegear.com/products/...-0-powered-hub

I've had mixed results with Orico gear - but mostly bad. I bought an
Orico 2 x SATA USB3 'dock' that managed to corrupt the partition of
the 2TB HDD I put in it. After a bit of toing and froing they agreed
to send me another which seemed fine at first until it wasn't a week
later. It corrupted another of my 'safe backup' 2TB HDDs. I Lost a
lot of data to that little venture.

I bought one of their 4 outlet USB chargers that was claimed to me
capable of 6A / 30W total and 2A per port. It got quite hot when I
pulled 2 x 1.6A from it (from 2 non-adjacent ports) and it failed
shortly after.

Oh and a couple of USB3 / SD card readers turned out to be slow and
ran hot compared to the no-name Chinese things I'd hoped to replace
but now am still using.

Actually now that I think of it my results aren't mixed at all,
they've all been bad and ended up in the rubbish. I stick with it for
a while as they seem to have good reviews and reasonable products but
my own experience is very different.

My experience too. I don't even remember the name of the brand of the
USB hub I had. I was bummed out about it because I used the hub
infrequently and didn't notice anything immediately.

John