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jmc2
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10 slot USB Powered HUB...use limit?

Thu Nov 05, 2020 1:03 pm

I've got 5 dvd drives plugged into 5 USB slots in my pc. Want to use the HUB and only use one high speed slot in my pc.
I've read that trying to use all the slots in the HUB will be iffy.

I'll be using half... Five dvds being read at once.
Anyone have much experience using a lot of HUB slots?
Things to look out for?

Thanks.
 
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Re: 10 slot USB Powered HUB...use limit?

Thu Nov 05, 2020 1:58 pm

As long as the hub's power brick is capable of supplying the full amount of power needed by the drives it should work.

USB 2.0 or 3.x? 5 DVD drives are not going to be able to run at anywhere near full speed if it is all being funneled through a single USB 2.0 connection. With all drives running at once and a USB 2.0 connection you'll probably be limited to something between 2x and 3x speed.
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Flying Fox
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Re: 10 slot USB Powered HUB...use limit?

Fri Nov 06, 2020 3:49 am

Are we talking about a massive ripping exercise or a big time duplicating run? :o
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jmc2
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Re: 10 slot USB Powered HUB...use limit?

Fri Nov 06, 2020 7:54 am

@just brew it!
"As long as the hub's power brick is capable of supplying the full amount of power needed by the drives it should work."
(Input USB is a 3.1 red slot.)

All the dvd drives have their own power supply. But there was suggestions that a single chip would not be able to
handle the input of 10 USB slots at once and that there was more then one chip in there to handle the load.

If that's correct then it would be best to make sure my 5 drives were plugged into as many of the separate "chips" as possible. No idea how to tell "slots per chip" except take the hub apart (?)

There was one surprise...one brand (Ankar?) stated "do not run external hard drives on their powered hubs".
Even tho the listed power for the hub was ample for an external hard drive. Don't know what's going on there.
Don't want to burn anything out.

Could you overheat a USB chip with a many hours HDrive backup?...My 64GB FlashStick can get HOT.

Main concern is iffy unreliable data transfer. Guess I'll find out the hard way.

I've had bad ext. HDrive docks that would transfer 10 GB with no problem but 100GB would just stop at some point in the transfer.

Now that has not happened with any of my WD or Seagate purpose built ext HDrives. Thank Goodness!
I had been a bit "gun shy" of USB data back ups...but so far so good!

@Flying Fox
Doing a one time "backup" and then the dvds are packed away. Seasons run to 2-5 dvds.

Thanks for the thoughts!
 
DrCR
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Re: 10 slot USB Powered HUB...use limit?

Fri Nov 06, 2020 8:47 am

A burn to optical media for a once every blue moon disaster recovery backup isn't a terrible way to go if you're only doing 2-5 DVDs.

That said, since you mentioned external hard drives, I'd get rsnapshot setup. Otherwise like me you could find yourself in a situation where you have copies of copies of copies and need to do a lot of dedup and organization. I spend a week doing just that and getting rsnapshot setup.
 
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Re: 10 slot USB Powered HUB...use limit?

Fri Nov 06, 2020 9:36 am

jmc2 wrote:
There was one surprise...one brand (Ankar?) stated "do not run external hard drives on their powered hubs".
Even tho the listed power for the hub was ample for an external hard drive. Don't know what's going on there.
Don't want to burn anything out.

Mechanical HDDs can draw several times their normal (steady-state) power when the platters first spin up. That would be my guess as to the reasoning behind the warning. If the drive has its own power brick it ought to be fine.
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Flying Fox
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Re: 10 slot USB Powered HUB...use limit?

Fri Nov 06, 2020 12:11 pm

just brew it! wrote:
jmc2 wrote:
There was one surprise...one brand (Ankar?) stated "do not run external hard drives on their powered hubs".
Even tho the listed power for the hub was ample for an external hard drive. Don't know what's going on there.
Don't want to burn anything out.

Mechanical HDDs can draw several times their normal (steady-state) power when the platters first spin up. That would be my guess as to the reasoning behind the warning. If the drive has its own power brick it ought to be fine.

How's the power draw profile from DVD drives compared to HDDs?

jmc2 wrote:
Doing a one time "backup" and then the dvds are packed away. Seasons run to 2-5 dvds.

I would say assuming the power issue is settled with each DVD drive having their own power supply, then I wouldn't worry too much about data rates. You should still be getting a gain reading in parallel. The shared bandwidth should in theory just roundrobined across all drives. But that also begs the question: since this is a one time thing and you value data accuracy more, why in such a hurry? Just do it right and steady once and be done with it?
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just brew it!
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Re: 10 slot USB Powered HUB...use limit?

Fri Nov 06, 2020 12:37 pm

Flying Fox wrote:
How's the power draw profile from DVD drives compared to HDDs?

Probably in the same general ballpark. But I'm pretty sure the ones that are designed to be USB-powered spin up slowly to avoid over-taxing the port's power capabilities.
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