You're Using USB Hubs Wrong - Here's How

The purposes of a USB hub are to both turn a single USB port on your PC into several, as well as help to organize all of your USB-connected devices around a convenient, singular point. When a USB hub is doing its job properly, it is incredibly convenient. However, if you've been experiencing random failures and disconnects in your USB hub, rather than a problem with your devices or PC, it may be because you're trying to plug too many power and data-hungry peripherals into it simultaneously.

A USB hub is a device in itself, and as with any other device, it has hard limits on what it's capable of, particularly in regard to what it can endure in terms of power and data usage. If you have too many hungry devices attached to your USB hub simultaneously, they may be trying to draw in more power and data bandwidth than the hub itself can handle, leading to errors and failures. If you're looking to cut down on this, you need to understand how a USB hub actually works, as well as reconsider what you're plugging into it and when.

A USB hub's job is to facilitate the transfer of data and power, depending on what you plug into it, like a flash drive or a charging cable. Much like plugging a power strip into an outlet, plugging a USB hub into a USB port on your PC effectively divides that single port's capabilities into multiple additional ports. This is convenient on paper, but you have to remember that a single port can only handle so many devices at once, even with a hub's help.

One of the major downsides of a USB hub is that the USB port the hub is plugged into, alongside the hub itself, can only facilitate so much action at once. Say, for example, the port and hub have a cumulative data transfer speed of 500 Mbps. If you've got multiple complicated devices and drives plugged into your hub, the data will flow extremely slowly between them as it all tries to get where it needs to go, kind of like a congested highway. In the same vein, complicated devices draw a lot of power, potentially more than the port and hub can supply together. Too many devices trying to pull power can easily overload the hub, causing a steep drop in performance.

These bottlenecks can lead to a variety of problems when using a USB hub, including sudden disconnects, laggy performance, crashes and shutdowns, and high operating temperatures.

If you're experiencing consistent errors when trying to use devices connected via a USB hub, before you blame your PC or the devices themselves, you might need to reflect more on how you're using your USB hub. The best thing you can do is think critically about how you're using your hub and reprioritize what's connected to it. If you have every single port on the hub filled up simultaneously with miscellaneous gadgets you're not actually using, you should unplug them all and save the ports for when you actually need them. Yes, the point of a USB hub is to give you more ports to work with, but that doesn't mean you have to use all of them. Plug simple, low-power devices and peripherals into the hub, like your mouse and keyboard, and move the high-power stuff over to your PC's actual ports. Don't forget to check a USB hub's specs before you buy and use it; knowing exactly how much data and power you have and need can help you to better prioritize what gets plugged in.

If you really need some extra muscle behind your USB hub, you can try switching to a powered one. Simple, unpowered USB hubs draw their necessary operating energy directly from the port they're plugged into, which can exacerbate power bottlenecks. A powered USB hub with a dedicated AC adapter can take some of the burden and handle a larger quantity of thirsty devices.