Review: Belkin 4-Port USB 2.0 Hub
Don Bradbury looks at Belkin's latest, neatly stackable, four port USB 2.0 hub
| Product | 4-port USB 2.0 hub |
|---|---|
| Company | Belkin |
| Web | www.belkin.com |
| Price | £59.99 inc VAT |
| We like | Easy setup, functional, stackable |
| We don't like | No position indicators for LEDs or ports |
| Rating | 9/10 |
| Requirements |
Even if you already have USB 2.0 added to your system, the plethora of new gear coming onto the market now means you'll soon run out of ports. Such gear already includes scanners, webcams, hard disk drives, CD writers etc. So adding a few more ports, and at the same time bringing far easier access to them by sticking them on the end of a decent lead attached to a hub at the front of the system box, makes a lot of sense.
This Belkin unit is from their stackable range, but they do a cheaper version that is not stackable. A neat and tidy unit in white and grey plastic, the Belkin hub features, besides the four downstream ports, one upstream for attaching to your USB 2.0 system (or addon) port, and a power socket into which you plug the supplied power supply unit.
Yes, yet another power socket is required I'm afraid. USB can provide up to 500mA of juice, and what's more, this unit controls each port at that level of current, not the unit as a whole, but there will be devices that need extra current so the hub has to be powered by other means than the system bus itself.
Install it.
Installation under Windows ME or later is easy. You just fire up the system, plug in the hub, and Windows automatically detects it and installs the required driver. That's it; it's ready for use. Windows 98 users will probably have to show Install their Windows CD for this.
Four port activation LEDs and one power LED adorn the front, and underneath you'll find the guides for stacking the unit if you have, or acquire, other units from the range. Neatly labelled to remind you that the hub caters for the USB 2.0 protocol, it is, of course, fully backwards compatible with earlier USB 1.1 gear, though you won't see the speed advantages if you don't upgrade these, of course.
The activation LEDs, by the way, feature colour coding. Normally green when all is well, if you get an amber light it represents an error condition. And blinking green or amber means attention is needed to software or hardware respectively.
Speed
Some reviewers have noted data transfer speed decreases when using hubs, but I carefully timed the copying of the My Pictures folder on my hard drive (939 files, 51 folders, 366MB) and, while there was some minimal system poling during copying, as evidenced by very brief activation LED stalls, I measured no more than 1.5% speed decrease while copying the files via the Belkin HUB as opposed to direct USB 2.0 transfer using a primary USB 2.0 port on an Adaptec DuoConnect card.
The actual data transfer rate you see depends on various circumstances on your system of course, but mine worked out to 41.2mbps, copying from an IBM Deskstar ATA66 hard drive to a Maxtor 3000LE external USB 2.0 disk. That's nowhere near the maximum theoretical speed of 480Mbps, but it's in line with other measurements I've made, and considerably better than using USB 1.1.
In conclusion
A USB 2.0 device cable and a user manual complete the deal, and all-in-all this Belkin hub 'does exactly what it says on the tin'. You can't ask more, and at the price it's a good deal.
