Chicago
Track Your Order
0
Your USB dongles are secretly slowing down your PC
Modern computers, laptops in particular, have really slashed the number of ports you get for plugging in peripherals. Following the example of MacBooks, some slim and light Windows laptops have just a pair of USB-C ports, forcing you to use a USB dongle hub to connect more than one thing, or dock your laptop with a desktop setup.
This is not as much of a problem as some vehement haters on the internet might have you believe, but there are some peripherals that benefit from having a direct connection to your PC all by themselves, largely due to how these dongle hubs work and share your PC's resources.
USB dongles hide bandwidth sharing you don’t expect
While two USB dongles might look the same from the outside, how that hub manages and shares bandwidth between devices connected to it matters. You may have noticed that MacBooks and some Windows laptops that clone the MacBook design have two USB-C ports next to each other, which some dongle manufacturers take advantage of. The hub connects to both ports at once, and so it can share the bandwidth of both ports around.
The thing is, it's common for these hub devices to have a single upstream USB controller that handles bandwidth allocation between devices. This means that this single controller is the bottleneck that dictates the total amount of bandwidth. If you have, for example, a USB4 port and a USB4 device, but have a USB 3.1 hub sitting between them, then that's all you'll get. The controller in the hub can only share as much bandwidth as it's designed to work with, not the port.
This is why it's important to, for example, get a Thunderbolt hub for a Thunderbolt port, or otherwise match your hub device to the specifications and capabilities of the host computer.
External SSDs are the most obvious casualty
If there's one class of device that deserves its own dedicated port on your computer, it's an external SSD. This is what I like to use the right-hand Thunderbolt port on my M4 Pro MacBook Pro for, since the left two are occupied by my dock. Even a USB 3 SATA SSD will eat up the bulk of your bandwidth. For example, I have several SATA SSDs connected to a single USB 3.1 port using a hub on my Windows laptop.
A speed test for any one of these drives shows they can easily reach their maximum speeds with ease. However, that's only true if I only use one of the drives at a time. Try to use both and they each become almost half as fast. That doesn't mean they aren't usable like this, it just means that if I need peak performance from one of them, I need to give it the entire pipe.
If we're talking about fast Thunderbolt or USB-C external SSDs where you could have more than 1GB/s of performance, then plugging it into a dongle hub is a surefire way to see a lot of the performance you paid for evaporate.
USB-over-Ethernet and adapters suffer quietly
One of the best things when it comes to dongle hubs is that they often include an Ethernet port. Wired internet connections are almost always superior to Wi-Fi, and thin-and-light computers tend to lack this option. The problem is that your hub's Ethernet port still has to share bandwidth like everything else. So, on high-speed connections, you might see reduced throughput compared to a dedicated USB-C to Ethernet adapter with its own dedicated port.
However, even if the Ethernet connection is still fast enough for your needs, that shared bandwidth might affect your connection in more subtle ways. I'm talking about lag spikes and instability when you're using Ethernet while also, for example, using a high-speed storage device. One of the key advantages of Ethernet is low lag and stability, but using it on a single connection shared with other bandwidth-hungry devices can undermine that.
Power delivery limits make throttling worse
The other issue is the simple matter of power. If the dongle is bus-powered (i.e. it gets all its power from the port it's connected to), then the total power available cannot exceed that maximum. Some storage devices may not work correctly or at all, and there may be other unpredictable results if there's not enough juice to go around.
This is why I've always preferred to use a dongle with inline power. You plug your charger into the dongle, and then plug the dongle into the computer. This ensures there's plenty of power for everything. When you're forced to use bus power only, such as when on the road, then you'll have to limit how much stuff you actually plug in.
When a dongle is fine and when it isn’t
Most of the time, for day-to-day use, dongle hubs work fine, but if you mix lots of power-hungry, latency-dependent, high-speed devices together and run them through a single dongle at the same time, you might run into some issues.
I haven't even mentioned dongles with display outputs like HDMI yet. Often, these are limited to older standards such as HDMI 1.4, because newer versions would need too much bandwidth, and if you're using HDMI and other high-speed applications at once, you might experience things like your screen blacking out or other issues.
In general, I think it's better to think of these dongle hubs as a way to diversify your ports rather than multiplying them, but if you spend more for a higher-end dongle hub that can use all the bandwidth from your host PC ports and allow for external power connectiones when needed, you should have nothing to worry about.
