Please, stay off my back. Or I will attack. And you don't want that.

[venta]

Does anyone know anything about USB hubs?

At work, I wish to plug in more devices than my laptop has USB slots. Usually I have plugged in:

1. A small portable HD
2. A USB mouse (OK, technically it's a USB trackball, but not to worry)
3. A keyboard, which is really PS2 but I have a decent converter.

I learned the hard way that at least (1) prevents me from using an unpowered hub.

So I bought this, which has two powered slots and five unpowered.

I expect (possibly wrongly) that (2) and (3) should be OK in unpowered slots. However! I often have issues where my keyboard/mouse stop working for a brief period (~10 seconds). During this time the laptop's built-in keyboard/mouse work fine. It's quite annoying.

Last week, I thought my HD had died, but I'm now cautiously optimistic that the problem was just that the hub wasn't powering it properly. When I plugged the HD in, its little blue light came up on but the disc didn't spin up. However, it seems to be behaving fine when plugged in directly to various different machines.

So... tell me, oh LJ, what do I need in the hub department? An ideal solution will Just Work with my three not-terribly-complicated peripherals, and will not take up very much space on my desk.

Comments

[shermarama]

I was poking around in these sorts of questions myself recently, trying to find the best way to go about attaching an external hard drive to my Raspberry Pi, and I came across plenty of recs for the hub timeplease suggests, but didn't want to buy extra stuff if I didn't have to. In the end what I did was attach the hard drive directly to the Pi, which can simply be told to deliver enough current to run it in the OS I'm using, and have keyboard and mouse going through the very cheap and nasty hub that I got along with the Pi itself. Do you have enough sockets to do something similar?

And furthermore, someone's posted a really long review on that Maplin site where they talk about it really being two separate hubs, where ports 1, 6 and 7 are the first directly-connected hub, and ports 2-5 are another hub connected to the fourth port of the first one. Is it worth jigging things around to use only 1, 6 and 7 and see if that makes a difference?

[venta.livejournal.com]

Do you have enough sockets to do something similar?

I do, just, but one of the appeals of a hub is having to plug in fewer wires when I get in of a morning :) At present I have to do 4 (power, HDMI in, USB hub, headphones). I blame Dell, who basically only make[*] two kinds of machines: (1) "office" machines, which have docking stations but are weedy and (2) "gaming" machines, which are powerful but don't come with such tiresome things as docks. A docking station would sort all of this nonsense out.

Is it worth jigging things around to use only 1, 6 and 7 and see if that makes a difference?

It's certainly worth it (and thanks for digging that out of the review, I hadn't spotted it!) Sadly, my keyboard (6) has "hung" twice in the time it's taken me to type this!

[*] or made, when I was choosing this laptop two years ago, they may have rectified this.

[timeplease.livejournal.com]

The hub I mentioned is also implemented as two four-port hubs internally. I suspect you'll find all "seven" port hubs are like this! It hasn't been a problem for me.

[shermarama]

Hmm. I'm now thinking of the mystery-desk-boxes we had at my last job, which plugged in via a single USB cable but then connected the external monitor, keyboard, mouse, ethernet, etc. (not power, but only having to plug two things in was good.) However, they were Lenovo boxes and all the laptops were Lenovo, so I don't know whether that counts as a brand-specific docking station even though it was at the end of a USB cable, rather than your traditional base stand thing. And I also have no idea what to call it to try and find out.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I didn't even know they were a thing. I'll do a bit of hunting, thanks!

[venta.livejournal.com]

Hmm, looks like I could get one of these (http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=us&cs=19&l=en&sku=470-ABHH), which would get it down to three (hub, power, headphones). Not sure 4->3 is enough of a win for the cost, though.

(I did, of course, mean HDMI out earlier, not in!)