Hacker News

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.

The trend of slapping two STT 4-port hubs together is so common, that even name-brand hubs for reputable brands are often this, including the back feed issues. I purchased hubs form a solar-named company, and one that has a similar name to a large US department store, and they were cascaded 4port, STT, ganged overcurrent and switching.

I've started buying PCBAs from Ali, where the vendor advertises the exact chip set in use. It's often cheaper than domestic options.

Listings for assembled hubs (whether ali or domestic) almost never include information about the hub's actual characteristics, unless you're looking at a 300+ hub sold to audiophiles.

I'd really like a source for a true 7p hub, with MTT, proper power, per-port overcurrent and power switching, but I can't seem to find one, especially since vendors tend to rev b2c products with no notice (one of the name-brand ones I bought had been downcosted shortly before I bought it).

My first thought whenever I come across such a badly-engineered no-name device is "oh great, another bad reference design which will poison the pool of all the available devices out there"

It helps a bit to spot and avoid that exact exterior design, but often those devices are designed to reuse the same mold as more-expensive ones and/or keep changing the design based on the purchasing customer.

So you end up on AliExpress looking at 5 identical hubs, but the cheapest one may have a different PCB inside.

Or you look at 5 different hubs, with all of them having the same PCB inside...

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?

It's a classic scam. It is a 3.0 USB 7-Port Hub, not a 7-port USB 3.0 Hub. The number 3.0 is the model number of the hub, not the protocol.

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-...

I haven't seen a USB 3.0 hub that I've liked, and I've paid top dollar.

USB 1.0 had a model where you really could enumerate 127 devices attached to a hub. The USB 3.0 makes no promises for what should be possible with hubs and if you actually try it you find that at some point plugging in a new device makes other devices drop out. Like I've never been able to plug 7 devices into a 7 port hub.

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.

Wow, thats very informative. This also tells you that cheap knockoffs can also be deadly if the circuity is poor.

I think that I have the same exact USB hub. I personally don't care about the USB 3.0 issue mentioned because it's only used to charge some devices. I think it's a controller charging station, a radio charging station, wireless charging station and a small device for rechargable batteries

I always think cables, hubs, and docks should be reliable ones even if they cost more

Otherwise they become the weakest links in your setup

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 :(

> 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 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.

I have one (ANKER IIRC?) that looks very much like this, but with two-position buttons that actually cut power, and USB3.0 level connection on all ports I tried. Also comes with the proper power supply for the barrel power connector. I suppose this one is a knock-off of mine :D

USB 3.0 Hubs have always been pretty "meh" for me. I think the quality control, even on name brands, is poor.

What's interesting to me is the part of this design that isn't junk: the single wired-through-to-the-host USB3 port. Why don't more hubs do this? I'd love to have access to a cheap port expander that lets me plug my junk in without losing access to the high speed port on the laptop. But no one sells that. You get a full USB3 hub, which is mostly wasteful for an input dongle or UART adapter, or a USB2 one that forces you to juggle stuff around when you need to plug in a thumb drive.

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?

$5 USD. What did you expect?

Always surprises me when people pay essentially nothing for a product and then complain about quality.

OMG, websites that don't properly render in modern browsers still exist in 2026, when you don't even need a human to create it.

One of the hopes I have for AI is that products like this become almost unsellable.

Gemini strongly disrecommends buying this product[1], but it's not clear if the opinion is based on Dr. Gough's review in-part.

This, of course, leads to another arms race where listings like this will be "AI optimized". They may have prompt injections, or simply specifically claim that issues like backfeeding are resolved when they are not.

And it also makes the AI companies an arbiter of what products are marketable.

[1] https://share.gemini.google/q2ujmGU7UgeS