I'm looking for a USB hub with 7+ ports, with at least some being 3.0 ports. What I'm having trouble finding is a hub with ports on the front AND back, and good feet so that it can sit on my desk. I don't like the dongles that just kind of hang around, I want it to be visibly "appealing" in the sense that it isnt half croked on one side, you get what I'm saying I hope. Any help would be great. Also the cheaper the better, but I'll pay for quality.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00F3J9GLM/ref=ox_sc_sfl_title_6?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A99MZGWBBIGK9
Thanks, definitely cheaper then the one I found earlier. In terms of limits on the amount of data it can handle at once, will there be an issue if there are multiple external hard drives, a controller, and other things that occasionally might all be operating at once?
found some 10 usb port that needs seperate AC power, but they came with 2 damaged ports, nothing you can't fix but not USB 3.0, for 10 bucks too.
I have no idea whatsoever. You should look at the limitations of the usb 3.0 spec and compare it to the bandwidth that the things that you are using need.
Well the bottleneck of the whole hub will be the USB cable running back to the PC.
So here's some things to note.
MAKE sure that it is a USB 3.0 cable running back to your PC so that you can get the maximum performance from the hub, you will never be able to get all or any apart from one of the USB ports to run at full speed because they are all the same speed, but, thumb drives and portable HDDs are generally only 100MBps or so you could potentially have 6 HDDs transferring at full speed ( I wouldn't do any big file moving all at once though) because USB 3.0 is 6Gbps (600MBps).
Also MAKE sure that it is using a POWERED USB cable back to the PC, they are the square looking ones with 2 of the edges being angled. This is important because you NEED (in your case) at least 2-4 USB connections worth of power for all your HDDs so just bare that in mind too.
If i remember correctly the biggest issue with usb hubs was that that cant seem to supply even power across hubs. So it ends up some have the power they need and others starve. The larger the hub the more problems your going to have. They might of improved that by now. I stop running larger hubs for sanity sake.
ya! I recommend you not run any drives through a cheap hub at all.
The hub I linked is a powered hub, so they likely have the power distribution sorted out so that all plugs get what they need.
Seems the best thing to do would be directly connect the external HDDs right to the mobo and just put less important connections via the hub. I'll still try to calculate out the bandwidth for my needs. Thank you