Comments on: The mother of all USB hubs

By: Ken

Ken — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 17:22:17 +0000

Let me add my reality check. My humble iMac G5 has THREE USB 2.0 ports on board. I use the ‘dome’ Kensington 7-port hub to connect (1) an HP scanner, (2) an iPhone, (3) an iPod, (4) a Mighty Mouse, (5) a Motorola USB cell phone and (6) an Apple Keyboard. I still have an on-board USB plus one external to spare.

Four external LaCie drives, DVD-RW and hard drives are on FireWire, printer on Ethernet, and small external speakers are on the mini-stereo. I don’t see a need for a 13-port hub now or in the future.

BTW, I don’t see wire clutter ‘cos the ‘dome’ is behind and below the iMac flat-panel screen, sort of out of sight.

By: Brian

Brian — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 19:25:10 +0000

This looks very handy I am always running out of usb ports.
It seems every thing has got a usb connecter on it nows days.

By: Jim Nichols

Jim Nichols — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 15:52:22 +0000

Although this one only has 7 ports, I find it to be helpful with cable clutter. It is the Kensington DomeHub.

http://us.kensington.com/html/6495.html

By: Paul Schmalz

Paul Schmalz — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 02:34:46 +0000

This is not related to the review of the USB hub per se but to the problem of external devices not appearing when waking from sleep (“There would be times where the last two hubs wouldnâ€™t wake up when the Mac Pro woke up from sleep.”).

I have found that if you restart the Finder when this occurs (by Option-click-n-hold on the Finder icon in the Dock and then choose “Relaunch”) that this usually solves the problem without having to unplug and then re-plug in the devices.

By: terrywhite

terrywhite — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 23:49:54 +0000

Jeff,
I posed your very good question to the folks over at Synchrotech and here’s what they said:

You are absolutely right on this. This hub is for people attaching mostly lower end USB 2.0 devices. Two higher performance device like hard drives or optical media devices will probably (not always) saturate a single USB port. That said, most of the time people aren’t using these kind of devices concurrently. You just might be fine with both the drive and the DVD duplicator running at once (let us know), but we wouldn’t recommend any more demanding devices at the same time than two. However, if guaranteed throughput for a higher performance device is needed, it is best to connect them directly to a host port.

The other issue is power. While the 13 port hub provides 4 Amps, that wouldn’t be adequate for 13 devices drawing between 500-600mA each. However, we designed this for typical users that might have between 2 to 3 USB devices pulling a lot of current, and the rest pulling nominal current.

By: Jeff Stoddard

Jeff Stoddard — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 18:46:54 +0000

Doesn’t an approach like this severely limit the USB throughput? You are taking one 480mbs connection and sending 13 devices through it. Most of Terry’s gadgets should be fairly low throughput, but having a DVD duplicator and hard drive attached would seem to be asking for trouble. Is this correct or just old school thinking on my part? Would you be better off connecting 3 five-port USB hubs to three separate USB connections on the computer and spreading out the high bandwidth devices?

By: Lynn Grillo

Lynn Grillo — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 17:15:50 +0000

Why oh why oh why can’t EveryDernThang be wireless? My desk looks like a Ronzoni factory. I think I’ll get one of these, but there will still be pesky wires everywhere. Sigh.

By: Alan B.

Alan B. — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 14:17:43 +0000

You seem to be high on Synchrotech products of late. I’m still considering the firewire CF card reader you reviewed earlier.

I agree that the octopus look is a little unbecoming. It would be cool to see a version with 10 ports on the back and then three in front for more occasional use…like for a portable drive.