When connected to USB hub same performance or less?

[Big-Mac-Please]

Hello

I have a belkin USB hub that I use and I would like to know if the USB ports on hubs have the same performance as the ones on the macine?

The hub has a mains power supply so I don't know if that boosts the performance?

The reason I ask is because I want to buy and external hard drive caddy and most of them seem to be USB2.0

I don't want to get one if its going to be mega slow because its going through a hub

Thanx for anyhelp!

BigMac

 

[adam3223]

Is it a usb2.0 hub, does your computer have usb2.0 ports??

If they are, I believe the max usb2.0 speed is about 480mb/s. 480mb/s is a reasonable speed for an external hard drive.

The problem is the hub could have 4 usb ports going in (all supporting 480mb/s) but there is only one port going back out (connecting the hub to your computer)

So you can't have 4 devices on the hub all trying to send 480mb/s back to the computer, each would be divided by 4 so they all can send data down the one wire back to the computer at around 120mb/s (which isn't really suitable for a hard drive)

But if you have one hard drive in one port, and perhaps a printer which is hardly ever switched on in another, then the hard drive would have the full 480mb/s available to it most of the time.

It does depends on you hub aswell, a decent hub would do the above, but if its a cheap one, it may cap each port at 1/4 of the speed so it doesn't have to bother about balencing it out.

Your hard drive will need quite a bit of power so it should be a powered hub (especially if there is a lot of other things connected to it at the same time).

 

[iBot]

well i know usb modems/routers have low peformance compared to ethernet, so i'm going to geuss using a usb hub will lower peformance slightly on usb hard drives.

 

[adam3223]

Actually the theoretical maximum of usb2.0 is 480mb/s
Whereas a networks theoretical maximum is 100mb/s
(assuming the newtork is a 100mb/s one that is)

 

[Big-Mac-Please]

Thanx for the replys

It was an expensive hub (£50) but the shop had miss priced a load so I got it for £20 heehee!

The hub is USB2.0 and it will be attached to a mac mini also 2.0

The only other thing attached to the HUB is my wireless microsoft mouse so hopefully that shouldn't use too much mb/s?

Thanx again for the help its good to know.