Not all Hubs are equal

Running out of USB 3 ports so bought an unpowered hub. Using a HDD Dock and cable direct to the PC's port I get transfer speeds of 170-180 MB/s. With the Hub connected 33 MB/s so that is a return. I have spotted another hub advertised as 5Gbps speed so will test that when it arrives. Double the price but you get what you pay for.

It is surprising how much slow stuff there is, USB 3 (5 Gbit) is only 18 years old now.

When you discover thunderbolt and USB 4 (40 Gbit) and the C connector is when you can get faster speeds. You then have to use external NVMe SSDs rather than hard drives.

make sure its a powered hub.

Just ordered a TP-Link 7 port powered going to test that.

So far so good with the TP-Link UH7000, 5 gigabit speeds with my SSDs. Another arriving Monday a Targus from Scan will test that.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

It is surprising how much slow stuff there is, USB 3 (5 Gbit) is only 18 years old now.

When you discover thunderbolt and USB 4 (40 Gbit) and the C connector is when you can get faster speeds. You then have to use external NVMe SSDs rather than hard drives.

My Mac mini has USB4 and thunderbolt, but I don't have anything to take advantage of it. The hub I have with a NVMe and a SSD drive in is 3.1. It is fine for me. I did look at external thunderbolt/USB4 drives, but the prices are crazy

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

My Mac mini has USB4 and thunderbolt, but I don't have anything to take advantage of it. The hub I have with a NVMe and a SSD drive in is 3.1. It is fine for me. I did look at external thunderbolt/USB4 drives, but the prices are crazy

Yes, the complexity of going as fast as 40Gbit/s increases the cost; not bad inside the computer (which as a Mac user you don't have that choice) but a lot more expensive externally as its much more complex.

The USB numbering is broken, the committee went mad. They now expect people to use the data rate.
A useful table, and comment:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/usb-3-2-explained

The version numbers are confusing and don't mean much, as USB 3.0, USB 3.1 Gen 1, and USB 3.2 Gen 1 are interchangeable and operate at 5 Gbps, while USB 3.1 Gen 2 and USB 3.2 Gen 2 are the same and operate at 10 Gbps.

My laptop (MS Surface Pro) has USB 4 (40 Gbit) and USB 4 supports Thunderbolt devices. The same era of CPU desktop only supports 20 Gbit (USB 3.2 Gen 2x2).

0.5 Mbit (USB 2 speeds from late 1990s)

5 Gbit (max over type A port)
10 Gbit
20 Gbit
40 Gbit

My Mac Mini M1 internal SSD is only 2.8 Gbit/s capable, similar to my Surface Pro laptop. The desktop PC has a PCIe 4 NVMe that does about 8 Gbit.

So really unless you have an external RAID array for some high end video work, then most of us would be happy with a 10Gbit port for accessories. iPhone 15 Pro was first that supported 10 Gbit. The iPad Pro range was faster. The standard iPhones only do 480 Mbps even on a USB-C port, as Apple seem to expect everyone to use WiFi.

Once you start to go 10gbits plus you start to munch thru pcie lanes. The lack of pcie lanes on modorn mobos is an issue sadly

In reply to a post by Banger:

So far so good with the TP-Link UH700, 5 gigabit speeds with my SSDs. Another arriving Monday a Targus from Scan will test that.

Well the Targus arrived today but was DOA so have applied for RMA and ordered another UH700 as it's an impressive piece of kit for 20 quid.

In reply to a post by Taras:

Once you start to go 10gbits plus you start to munch thru pcie lanes. The lack of pcie lanes on modorn mobos is an issue sadly

Agreed, with NVMe and graphics cards taking 90% of the lanes, not much left for I/O ports. Whereas on laptops which generally are using integrated graphics, there are more to go around.

I actually think I could fit a PCIe Thunderbolt/USB4 card in my desktop, but I have no need for it; not doing 4KUHD video, the single 3.2 Gen 2x2 20 Gbps port on my PC is good enough for my occasional need.

Well I now have 14 x 5Gbit ports which takes the pressure off the PC ports with unplugging and plugging.

More accurately, you have a number of ports sharing 5GGbit between them.

In reply to a post by Banger:

Well I now have 14 x 5Gbit ports which takes the pressure off the PC ports with unplugging and plugging.

Saves the A type connectors, hopefully your high bandwidth devices aren’t used at the same time. E.g. if you copy from disk A to disk B they are on different host controller ports (on your PC/motherboard).

The actual connector durability depends on which make the manufacturer purchased.

they are on different host controller ports (on your PC/motherboard).

They are indeed, one hub on the front ports one on the back ports. One of the back ports has become intermittent so though I would save the rest of the ports with the hubs.

Amazon must have mixed stock. The first hub I got was V5 hardware (no port leds) but the second was a V4 with port leds.

One thing I have noticed doing speedtests on disks Linux is a bit slower than Win 11. eg. Crucial X9 and Crucial X6 portable SSDs are slower than when tested with CrystalDiskMark in Windows. Guess I know which OS to do lots of file transfers!

Edited by Banger (Wed 24-Dec-25 21:43:55)

From a quick look, the x6 is dramless and the x9 isn't so that could be reason.

More testing and the X6 read speed is fast in CachyOS and Windows but I have got the speed higher with the help of Brave AI in Solus. Something to do with mount points in Linux (Solus) although don't explain why both X6 and X9 read at 450MB/s in both Windows and CachyOS. Could be RAM caching.

Solus is quite niche.. and a very niche package manager. It isn’t based on Debian (apt) or the Red Hat (dnf/yum) package managers. Not something I guess runs on any servers. (Something like 95% of all Linux installs are on servers).

Many operating systems will assume any USB devices is at risk of being disconnected without warning, so will not enable write caching to protect your data. If your USB drives stay connected for days/weeks at a time and you always tell the OS before disconnecting, then you can probably configure this.