i'm trying to decide what to do - i have 2 front USB ports that i can't use on the front of my pc (due to the way it's angled, and then the 4 on the back...i have 6 external 3.5" USB hard drives (self-powered), a multi-function printer, keyboard, mouse, and a bus-powered 2.5" hard drive i'd like to use now and then

so that's roughly 10 devices that could (in theory) be plugged in at one time...and while they wouldn't all necessarily be on and in use, i'd say that it's possible 7 or 8 might be used at once

if i were to get a 7-port powered hub (a hub is ideal, because it's a microATX board and i only have a single PCI slot left, and several things i want to put in it ), that would give me exactly the number of ports i needed and i wouldn't have to swap things out all the time (which i'm really getting sick of doing)

the problem is that i don't know if this is even feasible...i know USB is kind of flaky to begin with, and it seems that even the expensive powered hubs don't really help the situation...does anyone have any experience with a 7-port hub that you've actually filled up, that also doesn't flake out when everything plugged into it is on? or is this just a bad idea overall?

7/25/2008 9:07:40 AM

I've never had any problems with powered hubs at all. Currently I have a full 7 port hub and a 3/4 full 4 port one and don't have any issues at all.

7/27/2008 7:46:53 PM