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It's capable of outputting to dual 4K displays (or a single 5K display), has 10 GB/s USB 3.1 Gen. 2 capability, and can charge Thunderbolt 3 laptops with 85W power delivery. It's also designed to be used horizontally or vertically to better accommodate different setups. Some USB-C hubs go further by incorporating USB-PD passthrough. Here the idea isn’t so much to power the connected devices as to power the laptop the hub connects to, so that you just connect the laptop to the hub, and it charges as you use it without the charger taking up the spare USB-C port. The key thing here is how much power the hub can supply. Most will deliver 80W or more when used with a 100W charger, which should more than cover any laptop. However, with some you’re looking at 50W or less, which might mean missing out on fast-charging modes on some of those laptops that support them. We looked at how SD cards were inserted—you’d be surprised how many don’t work unless they’re inserted upside down! Both USB-C and Thunderbolt use the same USB-C connection. The difference is that a “generic” USB-C connection typically provides 10Gbps of bandwidth, and Thunderbolt provides 40Gbps, with a road to 120Gbps with 2024’s Thunderbolt 5. Even though two USB-C hubs may have wildly different brand names, you may sometimes find that they’re otherwise identical or just very similar.
It can work with various versions of the Pi, and the size of the board is designed to perfectly fit the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 / Zero W / Zero WH. Connection Notes Take some of the claims made by some manufacturers with a pinch of salt. We tested a couple of hubs that promised high-end features but failed to deliver during testing. For example, they might promise 4K at 60Hz, but you might find that this only works on specific laptops and displays.
Output ports: Make sure you get enough ports to attach the number of devices you’re likely to need. Most USB hubs have at least 3, more often 4, output ports, but at your desk, you may need a lot more than that. Also, consider whether you are attaching any USB-C devices (most output ports on hubs are Type-A). USB hubs are designed to expand on the number of ports a computer provides. This enables users to connect more peripheral devices than a laptop on its own would allow. Devices connected to the hub can be used simultaneously and most are highly portable. A USB-C port on your laptop can either run at 5Gbps or 10Gbps, with the latter being almost ubiquitous these days. That’s plenty of bandwidth for a printer, a mouse, a keyboard, or a hard drive, even all at once. Products like displays, ethernet, and high-speed SSDs gobble up that bandwidth, however. If the number of ports is your biggest concern, the Acasis 16-port USB hub is one of the biggest. All 16 ports are USB 3.0, and they all support fast charging up to 2.1A and data transfers up to 5Gbps. There are no compromises, no ports left behind—just full functionality across the entire unit. There are also seven- and ten-port variants if you want something slightly smaller. Ethernet, 2x SFP+, 24x USB, 2x PSU, 2x fan, user, 2x WWAN (if CORE module is inserted), Wi-Fi (on Wi-Fi models)
We also did power testing on every powered USB hub. To see just how much electricity the ports could deliver, we connected a MakerHawk Electronic Load Tester to the hub and tried to dial up as many amps as we could. As we dial up amps on any device, the voltage drops, so a 5 volt USB port could drop down to 4 volts or less as we increase the load, but USB devices need close to 5 volts – 4.7 or 4.8 volts is usually enough – so we tested how many amps we could get at 4.8 volts and at the, likely unacceptable, rate of 4.05 volts. It’s not exactly portable, but it’s certainly a good option for anyone who needs a massive boost in available USB ports. The option to fast-charge four mobile devices at once is ultra-convenient. Moreover, it’s plug-and-play compatible with PC, Mac, and Linux systems.Any extra connectivity? Some USB-C hubs will come with HDMI out, allowing you to connect to a monitor, provided that your PC can output video from its Type-C port. Other hubs have microSD or SD card readers built-in. We also connected an Android phone to the ports and recorded how many volts and amps it received. The phone charging test was probably the most realistic as it showed what kind of volts and amps a real device would negotiate with the hub. An adapter is included for connecting this with a Pi Zero micro-USB port, and a short micro-USB cable is included for all other 40-pin models of Raspberry Pi. Recent laptops have begun offering a USB-C technology called HBR3 with DSC, which we’ll explain more fully in the sections following our recommendations. The bottom line is that the technology offers something similar to the DisplayLink technology below, but as an industry standard. In our experience, although the technology is somewhat supported in laptops with 11th-gen Core processors, it works best in 12th- or 13th-gen laptops.
There are still a couple of caveats here. First, your device needs to support a DisplayPort 1.4 video output over USB-C, which will count out many Chromebooks and some MacBooks and Windows laptops. Second, the hub itself takes 15W of power, which means that – even with a 100W USB-PD charger – you may find some laptops not charging at their highest speeds. But if you’re happy to live with these compromises, this is one of the best USB-C hubs we’ve seen. Unlike cheaper hubs, it supports a full 60Hz refresh rate over HDMI, while there’s a Gigabit Ethernet RJ-45 port for when you need a physical network connection. The Type-C and Type-A connections could be faster, with our SSD speeds limited to around 458MB/sec, but this is a great fully featured hub that’s still affordable and – most importantly – just works. Windows® 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows Server® 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019 and Linux We conducted standardized tests to transfer a file from the SSD to the laptop; from the hard drive to the SSD; and then from an SD card to the PC, while simultaneously transferring files from the hard drive to the SSD. In some cases we used AJA’s System Tool app to run read and write tests on connected drives. In almost all cases, the performance was identical, with a spread of about 3 percent—good news for you, as that’s one less thing to worry about. If you have a recent-gen iPad with a USB-C connector, you may find yourself wishing you could connect a USB Type-A device, headphones or even an external display. Anker’s 541 USB-C Hub for iPads has you covered with a unique design that’s meant to snap right into the side of your tablet or even a USB-C laptop. There’s no wire as the USB-C plug and a slight, protruding chin hold the entire metal hub in place.The chassis is aluminum, so it’s rugged yet lightweight, and it looks great, too. This is the ultimate hub for anyone who wants to connect several devices or transfer data from multiple USB sources simultaneously. It's worth noting that when plugged into a computer, there is some connection latency for the higher-count ports. But the first four ports are fast and responsive. Not every USB Hub is one of the best USB hubs you can buy. We tested a number of other models that are worth considering, but not necessarily at the head of the class. I have been using the Sabrent HB-BUP7, the nearly-identical 7-port sibling to the HB-B7C3, as my daily driver for more than a year, and having these buttons is a real game changer. Changing default audio devices in Windows is a royal pain, requiring one to go into the control panel to, for example, make sound come out of your headset instead of your speakers. But with the power switches, I just turn off my USB speaker and turn on the wireless headphone dongle, or vice versa.
Keep in mind that the hub’s power port is for taking power into your laptop, and not outto a phone. But your hub may still be able to charge your phone, with some caveats. A “bus-powered” USB hub connects to your laptop and pulls power from it, which it has share with several devices—and it won’t do it that well. The USB has had multiple upgrades since it first came out, with each iteration introducing vast improvements and new features. USB 1.0s are generally not found much these days unless you have a somewhat ancient device, so the models you need to focus on run from USB 2.0 to USB 3.3.All MacBooks and many of the best Ultrabooks come with only USB-C ports, and just a couple of them. That’s why there are so many portable USB hubs that connect to a computer via a built-in USB-C cable and then provide a few Type-A ports, along with some extra goodies such as an HDMI out or a card reader. Anker’s PowerExpand 4-in-1 USB-C hub has one whiz-bang feature we haven’t seen anywhere else, and that’s a built-in 256GB SSD. IoT business automation requires communication with various IT assets and peripherals located across an enterprise. Digi AnywhereUSB® Plus remote USB hubs give users the simplest and most direct connection options for existing equipment with a variety of USB 3.1 Gen 1 port options. Ethernet is easier, as it’s hard to find a hub that doesn’t support Gigabit Ethernet speeds. That said, a small number now support the faster 2.5 Gigabit (2.5GbE) standard, which isn’t a priority for most home networks, but a plus for advanced users or just for future proofing.
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