Four-port USB 3.0 hub.

With this review, I’m wrapping up my saga of getting to know the USB 3.0 interface at home.
I use a USB hub all the time, and as the amount of data has grown, I’d like to increase transfer speeds too.
As usual, the review, teardown, analysis, and conclusions are all below the fold.

For many years I used a good, reliable D-Link hub. It worked great; I once replaced the capacitors in its power supply after noticing that it shut off when I disconnected the interface cable.
But time went by, and its speed was no longer good enough for me.
No, it’s fast enough for most things, but USB 3.0 flash drives and external hard drives have appeared (though the latter have been around for a long time), and I wanted to speed up reading and writing somehow.
That’s why I decided to add a USB 3.0 card to my computer first, and then get a matching hub.

The hub arrived, as usual, in an envelope, and was packed in a blister pack.
The back says what it can do and what it’s for. Nothing unusual here; it’s all obvious even without those labels :)


The package includes the hub itself and a cable for connecting it to a computer.
You could call this a no-name hub, i.e. one from an unknown manufacturer.


My computer sits deep under the desk, making it very hard to reach, so the old hub was placed on the speaker to the right of the monitor (you can spot it in some photos).
The old cable obviously wouldn’t work, so I ordered a longer cable for it right away.


The included cable is about 60 cm long; the extra one is 1.5 m.
The original cable is very stiff. The extra one is a little more flexible, but not by much.
They’re about the same diameter.


The hub is very small: 65 × 65 × 17 mm.


Instead of the usual Type-B connector, it uses a Type-A connector to connect to the computer.
I don’t think that’s a very good choice.
There’s also a connector for an external power supply (not included).
The additional ports are on the sides.
I’m more used to having the ports on the front, so I’ll see how convenient this layout is and whether I get used to it.


The old and new hubs side by side.


There are four rubber feet on the bottom. They don’t slip, at least while they’re still new.


Under the feet, I found four screws, which I promptly removed :)
The design is very simple: the body consists of a square metal frame with two plastic covers fitted on top and bottom, and the circuit board sits between them.



After taking it apart and putting it back together, I moved on to testing.

Since the tests had mostly gone well, I decided to try everything with a long cable. Until then, I'd tested the hub with the cable that came with it.
And then I was in for a major disappointment.
The hub would only start in USB 2.0 mode, and even when it managed to spin up the hard drive, the test ended with a read/write error.
Thinking the long cable was causing a power shortage, I decided to find a way to connect power to it.


Summary.
Pros
The hub's design is actually pretty good, and the assembly is neat, although there are traces of flux.
It can be powered from an external supply.
I have no complaints about the speed. The video dropping out was most likely caused by the lack of a frame buffer in the video adapter itself.

Cons.
The extra cable I ordered only works in USB 2.0 mode and has high resistance.
The connector for the cable to the computer is Type-A rather than Type-B, so finding a cable may be more difficult.

My take: the hub is perfectly usable. I wouldn't call it amazing, but it's a perfectly decent, working hub. The included cable is short and probably won't be much use, but it's better than nothing; at least it let me test the hub. But, as always, the subcontractors let me down :) More precisely, the extra cable let me down, so the move to USB 3.0 will have to wait a little longer.
I didn't like that the connector on the hub is Type-A. That's just wrong, since peripheral devices should use Type-B connectors. Those cables are easier to find, and you can't mix up which end goes where.


I hope this review helps someone and proves useful when choosing a USB 3.0 hub.