Teardown: A Generic 7-Port USB 3.0 Hub That Wasn't
goughlui.com195 points by speckx 4 days ago
195 points by speckx 4 days ago
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.
I've definitely realized this in a couple of markets: Buy cheap, get trash. Buy expensive, get expensive trash with better marketing. Working with power tools from various brands has made me realize they all cheap out in the same ways. Plastic gears where there used to be metal, undersized motor drivers that fry themselves under sustained load, trigger switches that start misbehaving or die completely after a few months.
Also, all of the brands (cheap or expensive) will sometimes mess up the cost-cutting and make something reliable by accident. Buying cheap gives me more chances to get lucky in this way.
Channels like project farm https://youtube.com/@projectfarm or other reviewers that are not sponsored are truly my main source of information in this age.
Some direct reviews between 2 and 4 stars are also sometimes useful. Always discard the 5 star ones...
https://www.youtube.com/@arduinoversusevil2025 also great for teardowns of specific tools. Seeing a few really put into perspective how many companies were transitioning to trading on their brand goodwill instead of making good stuff.
This wasn't the case 20 years ago. There was actually a good article on HN a few months ago showing how most of the brands are owned by one company that has ruined them all. Still a few good brands. Need to research https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48147665
This has been a problem for a while. It's Akerloff "market for lemons" applied to technology. Sometimes however you gamble and win, discovering that the Chinese device actually is really good for the price. Occasionally even better, when you discover that some anti-feature like DRM is either not implemented or trivially turned off.
This is my favorite version of this dynamic, intentionally buying the crap because they cheaped out on the antifeatures.
It used to be that cheap android junk devices would just give you a root shell with "adb shell" - no need for root exploits or reflashing - while expensive devices would give you a locked down shell.
The other day my bicycle light gave out, so I took it apart - was not the most expensive option, but also not the cheapest.
It was advertised as having a 2600mAh battery, but when I opened it up, inside there was a 1700mAh cell. Also no sign of purported weatherproofing, as the lens was not even glued in.
I have a 2000mAh cell in the same form factor (approximately 500Wh/l, so believable) on its way from China, which makes me wonder how did they come up with that 2600mAh figure.
> how did they come up with that 2600mAh figure.
The same capacity corresponds to different mAh at different voltages, maybe they are playing games with that.
AKA lying. No need to steelman dishonest small-time crooks and marketers from China.
Also, it's not the voltage, but over-current that reduces overall produced energy.
Typically the mAh is listed at some standard discharge rate, unless the cell is specifically advertised as a high-current draw cell. But either way an honest supplier will provide the draw/capacity table for you, rather than cherry pick the best one.
Because more is better. Seriously, the game they play is at this point ludicrous. I saw 18650 cell being advertised through the years as 2500mAh, to 3500mAh (still reasonable/credible), then suppliers started to one-up each other and you could see 5000mAh, 9000mAh, 9999mAh up to, I kid you not, 1.000.000mAh. If I had no clue, of course I would by the 1KAh single cell XD
I wonder when they're finally going to one-up each other with the 18650 model number itself? Make it 18660, 19650 or 18650000!
Anecdote: back in 2004, a friend brought home a cheap digital audio player from her vacation to China. IIRC, it said on the front panel that it could play back MP3, MP4, and MP5.
Flashlights are a good example of this too. "1 million lumens", like is that mini flashlight filled with plutonium?
> But if I pay more, who's to say I'll get a better product?
Price isn’t the only axis by which products are evaluated.
Aliexpress eBay and even Amazon are full of listings that have high prices, just waiting for someone naive enough to mistake them for quality products. They don’t sell much or at all.
When people find a cheap product from a known brand they jump on it because they know there’s a higher chance of it being okay, and if not there’s a higher chance that they can return it or get warranty support.
When people buy a JUPQRKBOT branded Amazon special for a too good to be true price, they know they’re playing a different and much riskier game.
Whenever I get the same device from AliExpress and the local white label importers, even though the outside casing is identical, AliExpress option has always had more quality. Locally sold ones has always the crappier internals albeit they come in a box (versus AE ones come in a bag)
The stance ‘all hubs are trash’ has served me well.
It's easy to get that impression when you're buying stuff from the big box store, because it's all race to the bottom type stuff.
When I run into this issue in any product category, I can solve it by searching for a solution from an "industrial" or "commercial" supplier. It'll cost 10x, but it'll usually work, and if it doesn't you'll at least be able to talk to someone who knows what they're doing.
In just about any product category, there is very little quality difference within the same order of magnitude in cost.
I recently built a usb hub.
I got a box, some usb cables that have a female end and are fitted to mate to the box. If you are curious, it’s a box made for pro-audio equipment with precut holes. The holes are made for xlr ports, and the usb cables are terminated with xlr ports.
Now I have a usb hub where all four ports are wired directly to my motherboard’s ports. I probably should write a blog post with a parts list.
I managed to get a couple of good ones. While they're more like docking stations, Kingston's, now discontinued, Nucleum and UGreen's wares are all good.
If you go higher level, of course there's Thunderbolt docks, but you can't make them cheaply, so they're generally good.
I've yet to come across truly reliable Thunderbolt 3 and above stations. Seems like every brand has, like this 7 port wonder in the article, lots of 5 star reviews. When you dig deep into the weeds of the reviews, Reddit, user forums, etc., you find the undercurrent of people who actually bother to check the stats reported by their OS, or have disconnect issues, etc, etc.
I'm somewhat sympathetic because from what I can tell engineering something capable of pushing that much data requires some exquisite engineering for every part of the process (chips on your computer, your computers port, your cables, the dock, the cable into the end device and the device and its port and chip). But still, they present these products like they're bulletproof.
It's possible I've had bad luck. A Caldigit TS3 had issues with dropping external drives and becoming unresponsive, then died after 2 years. Caldigit TS4 bricked itself after about a year. Got an OWC Thunderbolt Dock now and it just decides sometimes to stop communicating to anything new plugged in until you power cycle it.
I use Dell Thunderbolt docks because that's what my employer gives us and as such I've collected a few of them. I've had zero issues with them. The only complaint is that the power button on the dock only seems to work with Dell laptops, not a huge issue since I don't think that's a typical feature anyway.
I don't know about yours but anything I've seen that works has a limited number of plugs on it. Keyboard and mouse and a USB hard drive and the occasional thumb drive... You are fine. The 7-port hub is a bad smell, like you can't plug 7 devices into a USB 3.0 bus due to undocumented limits.
But if you have that AND a USB bluetooth dongle, a USB ethernet adapter, USB DAC with SPDIF output you run into the "USB-C is best effort at best when you plug in a lot of devices" problem... Which never gets talked about, though if you talk to Copilot or Gemini about it they will tell you don't waste your time with USB 3.
I've got a Dell USB4 dock on my desk right now. It has generally had pretty good compatibility. The only complaint I really have about it is that it gatekeeps higher PD options behind proprietary signaling so while it can technically output higher than 60W nothing but a Dell device will properly unlock it.
This isn't usually a problem for most of my devices. My Thinkpads just alert me and say they're not charging at full speed, ending up negotiating something like 58W or so. Similar things with other devices. However, I've got one machine that will not even attempt to charge unless it definitely gets 20V/3.25A, which this dock just will not negotiate to for non-Dell devices.
I was about to say caldigit and then you called them out. I have had a TS3 for six years and it still going strong and I have had basically zero compatibility issues across a range of (Mac) devices and peripherals.
I've generally found that the more expensive, branded USB C hubs are more trash than the cheap generics
I came to that conclusion when buying electric milk frothers. Several, because there is no difference between cheap and expensive. At all. They're all crap :')
If you live in Europe, I recommend trying one from Lidl. It was cheap and so far I've been quite satisfied with it.
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).
Why not name the sellers?
I have no idea what the solar named brand is, but maybe the department-store-like one is Targus?
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...
"Ah, that's Rev. B, yeah, known problem..." Like I could somehow buy by PCB rev. Sometimes they even swap entire controllers within the same Rev.
That's the point, the dimension is "yeah, the ODM also offers a 2 USD cheaper hub that uses a USB2.0 controller for 7 of the 8 ports", and now you're browsing a list of equally looking products spanning 5 to 15 USD without a clue which of the straws you're going to pull...
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?
I had the opposite problem actually I think. I have these small nano teensy USB things that are programmable similar to Arduino, but they have a poor negotiation at start. I was using these to automate keyboard activity, so when plugged in they appear as a USB HID.
This crappy 7 port hub is one of the only ones that "works" to reprogram the chips over USB. Direct connections and other hubs cause it to always appear as a HID and never appear as a thing that can be reprogrammed.
> I was using these to automate keyboard activity,
I’m interested.
I was automatong pressing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in a loop with a knob to adjust the loop time. This was to protest Path of Exile potion management requiring you to constantly press that for hours near end game. Also, to be clear, this is not a good potion strategy in terms of being competitive, it's a survival mechanism.
I'm curios why go HW route versus programming a keeb/mouse/ahk macro? For example, that one time I had a build in Diablo 4 where I needed to constantly rotate abilities to maintain it, which I solved with a macro on repeat that was toggled on/off with a button press. Does PoE discourage macro/ahk use?
It was kinf of a protest against the whole popcicle stick controversy in Path or Exile. People were getting banned for using macros and I wanted to demonstrate it was a pointless battle. Yes, ban botters and cheaters, but not for loops that reduce injury.
You can check my own project doing the same. It's a one key keyboard that also can be set to jiggle the mouse a bit.
Did you use generative AI to design this? Superpowers plugin? This is cool, but if you did use AI that’s another level of cool :)
https://github.com/markomarkovic/nena-ilo-lili/blob/main/doc...
Agents are pretty good at this stuff, I coded a bike shifter button module with basically zero experience in the subject and it works pretty well: https://github.com/Klaster1/open-elin
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.
Ah like the roller bearing manufacturer established in the town of Ball, so the company could be called BALL BEARING.
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-...
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.
Yep. I bought one of these intentionally for that reason. The USB port on my Kobo Clara HD stopped working one day after I hadn't used it in a wile. Couldn't connect to it via my PC or my laptop. I did a bit of research and realized the Kobo I had won't work on a USB 3.0 connection, and that I had upgraded my PC and my laptop (all equipped with fancy smanchy USB 3.0 port) since I'd last used the Kobo.
What do you recommend?
There was actually one I managed to find on Aliexpress, out of all places, that turned out to be legit.
It looked like that, I can't guarantee they're all created the same though, also it has RGB lights for some reason.
https://ae01.alicdn.com/kf/S6b270a53da9b4179af73036c5f6f9c89...
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.
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.
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
I trust Anker and yet I recently got a phone charger where the USB wall adapter was a dud
USB 3.0 Hubs have always been pretty "meh" for me. I think the quality control, even on name brands, is poor.
It's the spec. "It just doesn't work" whether or not the hardware or software is good quality.
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?
It's actually the importer's info from the Chinese manufacturer, not the OP, since it's the switch packaging (it'd be inside the original package they'd have received from Aliexpress)
AliExpress shipping is wild.. as far as I understand it they try to find the cheapest place to send packages from, so (living in Europe) I've received packages from Australia and Azerbaijan. They probably send a palette of stuff to a country that has cheap International postage, and from there the palette of goods get broken down and packaged for the 1000s of end-consumers..
I once noticed that there were eBay auctions with free shipping closing with no bids, minimum 1 cent bid. I wrote a script and bid on 1000 random items, all from China, all Aliexpress style items. Every single one of them was shipped from Mongolia.
I regularly get addressed Aliexpress packages that contain multiple addressed packages (e.g. from the same order), so they may in fact be sending pallets full of packaged and addressed items to another country for re-packing and re-shipping
Yeah, I used to get stuff directly from China, then after the postage rate changes I was getting packages that had gone China -> Thailand -> Azerbaijan -> USA. Nowadays they seem to batch packages for the good shipping, from Aliexpress in China to (I assume) some US subsidiary, and then from there it gets parceled out to a shipping company seemingly at random (Maersk, Amazon, USPS).
So the US had the USPS stop subsidizing Chinese postage rates... and they innovated to leverage subsidies elsewhere.
Just stop subsidizing international shipping period seems the smart play. If they want to undercut their own high-end domestic competition and destroy foreign competitors then they can at least pay fair rates.
Which part of "send a giant box of stuff to the US using regular shipping channels and pay whatever duties and/or tariffs are due, sort it out into individual destinations once it gets there, and then deliver with USPS at regular domestic rates" involves this subsidy that you speak of?
[flagged]
[flagged]
[dead]
$5 USD. What did you expect?
Always surprises me when people pay essentially nothing for a product and then complain about quality.
Marketed as a USB 2.0 hub with a single USB 3.0 port? When I last looked, typing truth via keyboards were free and valuable at the same time.
Right? This is basically one small step away from stuff like “2TB usb stick for $20” scam listings on AliExpress. Of course it will be fake or crap. Cool tear down and write up though.
I would expect at any price point the seller should not be lying about the specs.
I mean yeah you get what you pay for. The main issue I think is false advertising; there's only so much you can do for foreign webshops, but if this were on e.g. Amazon, then Amazon should be pulled up on it (that is, huge fines so they don't do it again).
EU is cracking down on foreign webshops at least, setting rules for advertising, increasing import taxes to avoid flooding the local market with many individual packages that circumvent spot checks for basic electronic safety and (EM) emissions (what the FCC looks out for as well), etc.
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.
Why on earth do you think an LLM would be capable of detecting problems with a listing like that without a human doing so first? LLMs are just as gameable as SEO, if not more so.
