damn crappy hub

[johnridley]

I finally remembered to grab a USB hub from home, so I can plug my thumb drives and hard drive in without crawling under my desk.

And, it's flaky as heck. Took 5 tries to get it to recognize the hub, and it's flaked and disconnected the drive twice so far.

They put a 3rd monitor on my desk about 9 months ago, and the only thing I've ever used it for was as a USB hub, but I don't like having to run a whole monitor just to act as a USB hub, so I was looking forward to getting a separate hub so I could totally disconnect that monitor.

Heck, I don't even really need TWO monitors. The 2nd one just runs the web browser.

I should probably just use a USB extension cable instead, since I don't actually need a hub. I think I'm going to throw this hub away though.

In the future, if I need to buy any USB hubs, I'll take a good look at reviews. Seems like there are a lot of totally crap hubs out there.

Comments

[madtechie2718.livejournal.com]

I've generally found unpowered hubs to be flaky when plugged into a front panel USB socket on most machines (voltage drop on the long thin internal wires I suspect) and a bit better on the rear.

I've had good results even with the cheapest of powered ones.

Because I hate having a wallwart squandering power all the time, I've also had good luck by butchering the power cable to a powered hub such that it connects (power pins only) to a seconf USB hub to provide a bit more current - this seems to be a very successful strategy.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I had two identical hubs with cable, hub and power supply (needed a powered hub since I run a 2.5" external drive from it) so I was able to swap things around. It turned out to be a bad cable.