There's a lot of "USB 3.0 hubs" on the market that have only one 3.0 port, I went back and forth buying/returning a lot on Amazon before giving up on getting one that had all 3.0 ports.
Well, of course there is the "buy cheap, get trash, duh!" talking point. But if I pay more, who's to say I'll get a better product? The OEM or some middleman or whoever might just pocket the difference and push crap anyway. Well-known brands have done this as well, either intentionally or because they got shafted by their supplier as well.
This has been a problem for a while. It's Akerloff "market for lemons" applied to technology. Sometimes however you gamble and win, discovering that the Chinese device actually is really good for the price. Occasionally even better, when you discover that some anti-feature like DRM is either not implemented or trivially turned off.
I've definitely realized this in a couple of markets: Buy cheap, get trash. Buy expensive, get expensive trash with better marketing. Working with power tools from various brands has made me realize they all cheap out in the same ways. Plastic gears where there used to be metal, undersized motor drivers that fry themselves under sustained load, trigger switches that start misbehaving or die completely after a few months.
Also, all of the brands (cheap or expensive) will sometimes mess up the cost-cutting and make something reliable by accident. Buying cheap gives me more chances to get lucky in this way.
The other day my bicycle light gave out, so I took it apart - was not the most expensive option, but also not the cheapest.
It was advertised as having a 2600mAh battery, but when I opened it up, inside there was a 1700mAh cell. Also no sign of purported weatherproofing, as the lens was not even glued in.
I have a 2000mAh cell in the same form factor (approximately 500Wh/l, so believable) on its way from China, which makes me wonder how did they come up with that 2600mAh figure.
I managed to get a couple of good ones. While they're more like docking stations, Kingston's, now discontinued, Nucleum and UGreen's wares are all good.
If you go higher level, of course there's Thunderbolt docks, but you can't make them cheaply, so they're generally good.
I've yet to come across truly reliable Thunderbolt 3 and above stations. Seems like every brand has, like this 7 port wonder in the article, lots of 5 star reviews. When you dig deep into the weeds of the reviews, Reddit, user forums, etc., you find the undercurrent of people who actually bother to check the stats reported by their OS, or have disconnect issues, etc, etc.
I'm somewhat sympathetic because from what I can tell engineering something capable of pushing that much data requires some exquisite engineering for every part of the process (chips on your computer, your computers port, your cables, the dock, the cable into the end device and the device and its port and chip). But still, they present these products like they're bulletproof.
It's possible I've had bad luck. A Caldigit TS3 had issues with dropping external drives and becoming unresponsive, then died after 2 years. Caldigit TS4 bricked itself after about a year. Got an OWC Thunderbolt Dock now and it just decides sometimes to stop communicating to anything new plugged in until you power cycle it.
Wow what an unexpectedly useful article! I have exactly this hub and wondered if I was imagining things. It absolutely has issues beyond that, for example I somehow managed to make a couple of ports unusable for micro-controller flashing even though they used to work just fine. For that price, it's an OK choice to low bandwidth stuff like periphery dongles and security keys, and the form-factor makes it easy to attach under desk or behind display. And buttons come in handy when you need to unpower a dev board. Anyone can recommend a similar shaped proper USB 3 hub off Ali?
I had the opposite problem actually I think. I have these small nano teensy USB things that are programmable similar to Arduino, but they have a poor negotiation at start. I was using these to automate keyboard activity, so when plugged in they appear as a USB HID.
This crappy 7 port hub is one of the only ones that "works" to reprogram the chips over USB. Direct connections and other hubs cause it to always appear as a HID and never appear as a thing that can be reprogrammed.
I was automatong pressing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in a loop with a knob to adjust the loop time. This was to protest Path of Exile potion management requiring you to constantly press that for hours near end game. Also, to be clear, this is not a good potion strategy in terms of being competitive, it's a survival mechanism.
I'm curios why go HW route versus programming a keeb/mouse/ahk macro? For example, that one time I had a build in Diablo 4 where I needed to constantly rotate abilities to maintain it, which I solved with a macro on repeat that was toggled on/off with a button press. Does PoE discourage macro/ahk use?
Whats always annoying is by using nested 4-port hub chips inside a hub with more than 4 ports you get very easily to the max nested depth limit (5). I have a monitor kvm switch that is also an usb hub. It itself only has two ports. Two usb hubs (that are internally nested) are plugged into those ports that I have at the back of my desk where all the HID are plugged in, but I also have a usb hub on the front of my desk so I can easily hotplugmy joysticks, yubikeys and usb flash drives.
Apparently that use case is very complicated with USB even in modern times :(
I think this was somewhat predictable. The USB cable from the hub is too long, and it's not thick enough. USB3 can also kick off a decent amount of heat, it's not a good sign when the case is in plastic.
If you're looking for a good USB3 hub, look for one with a short thick USB cable, metal chassis. If it has HDMI it's a good since because you're unlikely to pump that via USB2.
> This means a connected external power supply will backfeed the computer and that could be a recipe for damage to the port or the computer and is something we had known about causing issues over 20 years ago, yet we’ve still got designs with this issue today.
On the other hand it's useful for space constrained embedded projects. I got a small outdoor enclosure for a Pi Zero, to which two RTL-SDR sticks are attached - too much to supply via the Pi's USB-OTG power rail alone. With the Adafruit microUSB OTG hub [1], I now only have one power supply going into the hub that backfeeds the Pi Zero... one cable less.
Not much to say about the article itself ("cheap stuff from AliExpress-or-its-Amazon-representatives isn't great, news at 11"), but just in case the author happens to be following comments here: I'm pretty sure the first photo shows your name, address and email in small print at the top?
It's actually the importer's info from the Chinese manufacturer, not the OP, since it's the switch packaging (it'd be inside the original package they'd have received from Aliexpress)
AliExpress shipping is wild.. as far as I understand it they try to find the cheapest place to send packages from, so (living in Europe) I've received packages from Australia and Azerbaijan. They probably send a palette of stuff to a country that has cheap International postage, and from there the palette of goods get broken down and packaged for the 1000s of end-consumers..
I regularly get addressed Aliexpress packages that contain multiple addressed packages (e.g. from the same order), so they may in fact be sending pallets full of packaged and addressed items to another country for re-packing and re-shipping
Yeah, I used to get stuff directly from China, then after the postage rate changes I was getting packages that had gone China -> Thailand -> Azerbaijan -> USA. Nowadays they seem to batch packages for the good shipping, from Aliexpress in China to (I assume) some US subsidiary, and then from there it gets parceled out to a shipping company seemingly at random (Maersk, Amazon, USPS).
I mean yeah you get what you pay for. The main issue I think is false advertising; there's only so much you can do for foreign webshops, but if this were on e.g. Amazon, then Amazon should be pulled up on it (that is, huge fines so they don't do it again).
EU is cracking down on foreign webshops at least, setting rules for advertising, increasing import taxes to avoid flooding the local market with many individual packages that circumvent spot checks for basic electronic safety and (EM) emissions (what the FCC looks out for as well), etc.
There's a lot of "USB 3.0 hubs" on the market that have only one 3.0 port, I went back and forth buying/returning a lot on Amazon before giving up on getting one that had all 3.0 ports.
Well, of course there is the "buy cheap, get trash, duh!" talking point. But if I pay more, who's to say I'll get a better product? The OEM or some middleman or whoever might just pocket the difference and push crap anyway. Well-known brands have done this as well, either intentionally or because they got shafted by their supplier as well.
This has been a problem for a while. It's Akerloff "market for lemons" applied to technology. Sometimes however you gamble and win, discovering that the Chinese device actually is really good for the price. Occasionally even better, when you discover that some anti-feature like DRM is either not implemented or trivially turned off.
I've definitely realized this in a couple of markets: Buy cheap, get trash. Buy expensive, get expensive trash with better marketing. Working with power tools from various brands has made me realize they all cheap out in the same ways. Plastic gears where there used to be metal, undersized motor drivers that fry themselves under sustained load, trigger switches that start misbehaving or die completely after a few months.
Also, all of the brands (cheap or expensive) will sometimes mess up the cost-cutting and make something reliable by accident. Buying cheap gives me more chances to get lucky in this way.
The other day my bicycle light gave out, so I took it apart - was not the most expensive option, but also not the cheapest.
It was advertised as having a 2600mAh battery, but when I opened it up, inside there was a 1700mAh cell. Also no sign of purported weatherproofing, as the lens was not even glued in.
I have a 2000mAh cell in the same form factor (approximately 500Wh/l, so believable) on its way from China, which makes me wonder how did they come up with that 2600mAh figure.
The stance ‘all hubs are trash’ has served me well.
I've generally found that the more expensive, branded USB C hubs are more trash than the cheap generics
I managed to get a couple of good ones. While they're more like docking stations, Kingston's, now discontinued, Nucleum and UGreen's wares are all good.
If you go higher level, of course there's Thunderbolt docks, but you can't make them cheaply, so they're generally good.
I've yet to come across truly reliable Thunderbolt 3 and above stations. Seems like every brand has, like this 7 port wonder in the article, lots of 5 star reviews. When you dig deep into the weeds of the reviews, Reddit, user forums, etc., you find the undercurrent of people who actually bother to check the stats reported by their OS, or have disconnect issues, etc, etc.
I'm somewhat sympathetic because from what I can tell engineering something capable of pushing that much data requires some exquisite engineering for every part of the process (chips on your computer, your computers port, your cables, the dock, the cable into the end device and the device and its port and chip). But still, they present these products like they're bulletproof.
It's possible I've had bad luck. A Caldigit TS3 had issues with dropping external drives and becoming unresponsive, then died after 2 years. Caldigit TS4 bricked itself after about a year. Got an OWC Thunderbolt Dock now and it just decides sometimes to stop communicating to anything new plugged in until you power cycle it.
Wow what an unexpectedly useful article! I have exactly this hub and wondered if I was imagining things. It absolutely has issues beyond that, for example I somehow managed to make a couple of ports unusable for micro-controller flashing even though they used to work just fine. For that price, it's an OK choice to low bandwidth stuff like periphery dongles and security keys, and the form-factor makes it easy to attach under desk or behind display. And buttons come in handy when you need to unpower a dev board. Anyone can recommend a similar shaped proper USB 3 hub off Ali?
I had the opposite problem actually I think. I have these small nano teensy USB things that are programmable similar to Arduino, but they have a poor negotiation at start. I was using these to automate keyboard activity, so when plugged in they appear as a USB HID.
This crappy 7 port hub is one of the only ones that "works" to reprogram the chips over USB. Direct connections and other hubs cause it to always appear as a HID and never appear as a thing that can be reprogrammed.
> I was using these to automate keyboard activity,
I’m interested.
I was automatong pressing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in a loop with a knob to adjust the loop time. This was to protest Path of Exile potion management requiring you to constantly press that for hours near end game. Also, to be clear, this is not a good potion strategy in terms of being competitive, it's a survival mechanism.
I'm curios why go HW route versus programming a keeb/mouse/ahk macro? For example, that one time I had a build in Diablo 4 where I needed to constantly rotate abilities to maintain it, which I solved with a macro on repeat that was toggled on/off with a button press. Does PoE discourage macro/ahk use?
You can check my own project doing the same. It's a one key keyboard that also can be set to jiggle the mouse a bit.
https://github.com/markomarkovic/nena-ilo-lili
The linked article on the same blog on building a tower of optical drives is also quite interesting: https://goughlui.com/2026/03/15/project-building-an-optical-...
Whats always annoying is by using nested 4-port hub chips inside a hub with more than 4 ports you get very easily to the max nested depth limit (5). I have a monitor kvm switch that is also an usb hub. It itself only has two ports. Two usb hubs (that are internally nested) are plugged into those ports that I have at the back of my desk where all the HID are plugged in, but I also have a usb hub on the front of my desk so I can easily hotplugmy joysticks, yubikeys and usb flash drives.
Apparently that use case is very complicated with USB even in modern times :(
I think this was somewhat predictable. The USB cable from the hub is too long, and it's not thick enough. USB3 can also kick off a decent amount of heat, it's not a good sign when the case is in plastic.
If you're looking for a good USB3 hub, look for one with a short thick USB cable, metal chassis. If it has HDMI it's a good since because you're unlikely to pump that via USB2.
> This means a connected external power supply will backfeed the computer and that could be a recipe for damage to the port or the computer and is something we had known about causing issues over 20 years ago, yet we’ve still got designs with this issue today.
On the other hand it's useful for space constrained embedded projects. I got a small outdoor enclosure for a Pi Zero, to which two RTL-SDR sticks are attached - too much to supply via the Pi's USB-OTG power rail alone. With the Adafruit microUSB OTG hub [1], I now only have one power supply going into the hub that backfeeds the Pi Zero... one cable less.
[1] https://www.amazon.de/dp/B0DBMXCTRG
I used to have exactly one like that but without all the bogus 3.0 printing on it.
Not much to say about the article itself ("cheap stuff from AliExpress-or-its-Amazon-representatives isn't great, news at 11"), but just in case the author happens to be following comments here: I'm pretty sure the first photo shows your name, address and email in small print at the top?
It's actually the importer's info from the Chinese manufacturer, not the OP, since it's the switch packaging (it'd be inside the original package they'd have received from Aliexpress)
AliExpress shipping is wild.. as far as I understand it they try to find the cheapest place to send packages from, so (living in Europe) I've received packages from Australia and Azerbaijan. They probably send a palette of stuff to a country that has cheap International postage, and from there the palette of goods get broken down and packaged for the 1000s of end-consumers..
I regularly get addressed Aliexpress packages that contain multiple addressed packages (e.g. from the same order), so they may in fact be sending pallets full of packaged and addressed items to another country for re-packing and re-shipping
Yeah, I used to get stuff directly from China, then after the postage rate changes I was getting packages that had gone China -> Thailand -> Azerbaijan -> USA. Nowadays they seem to batch packages for the good shipping, from Aliexpress in China to (I assume) some US subsidiary, and then from there it gets parceled out to a shipping company seemingly at random (Maersk, Amazon, USPS).
$5 USD. What did you expect?
Always surprises me when people pay essentially nothing for a product and then complain about quality.
Marketed as a USB 2.0 hub with a single USB 3.0 port? When I last looked, typing truth via keyboards were free and valuable at the same time.
Would you say the same about a vendor selling rotten or spoiled food?
If it was 1/4 the normal price, I’d be suspicious.
I would expect at any price point the seller should not be lying about the specs.
I mean yeah you get what you pay for. The main issue I think is false advertising; there's only so much you can do for foreign webshops, but if this were on e.g. Amazon, then Amazon should be pulled up on it (that is, huge fines so they don't do it again).
EU is cracking down on foreign webshops at least, setting rules for advertising, increasing import taxes to avoid flooding the local market with many individual packages that circumvent spot checks for basic electronic safety and (EM) emissions (what the FCC looks out for as well), etc.