We all lack ports to connect peripherals and so we end up buying a hub to be able to connect more peripherals to our PC at the same time. However, everything usb port replicator they keep a dark secret, which very few people know and which must be taken into account when buying if you don’t want to have any unpleasant surprises.
You can find USB port replicators anywhere, and they work great when we use a laptop with no more than three ports and need to connect multiple devices at the same time. For example, hard drive, printer, microphone, external sound card. The normal thing is to take the first concentrator that we see in the store next to the house.
The limits of a USB port replicator
The best way to add usb ports if we have a tower pc it is via an expansion card which gives you enough power and adequate bandwidth for each of the ports. On the other hand, if we use a USB port replicator that connects to a port of the same name, the performance ends up being distributed between the different devices. So why is there no problem for many users? Because you can connect several devices in a chain and the time dedicated to each of them is distributed in a rotating manner.
- If we are using a mouse or keyboard, a USB hub will not affect performance in any way, as the additional latency is marginal.
- On the other hand, if we are talking about earphones, sound card or external hard drive, additional latency is added which affects performance by adding extra time.
The problem arises when we have few ports and cannot use an expansion card to connect more peripherals. This is when we get our fingers stuck and often have to free up ports using interfaces like Bluetooth to free up ports on our laptop. The other point is the bandwidth, since the additional ports derive from another port, then the number of bytes per second must be shared.
What you really need to look at when buying
The bone USB 2.0 docking stations which can be found at a discount use something called Transaction Translator. It is a temporary memory which accumulates the requests from and towards the peripherals. The problem comes from those that are of the Multi-TT type, which allow requests to be made in parallel, which reduces latency, but at USB 1.1 speeds. That is, with a bandwidth of 12 Mbps, which today is very mediocre, but for many devices it is more than enough.
Our advice? Only use these port replicators if you’re using a mouse and keyboard on them, they don’t even need the speed of a first-gen USB port. If you’re a musician, you’re more interested in latency than bandwidth. So, using a hub with Multi-TT capability will be much more beneficial for you.