Another Windows oddity?
 

My desktop has six USB ports, 2 front, 4 rear, all designated as USB2.0.

Because the rear ones are inconvenient and because I'm lazy I've put a 4-way hub in one of the front ones. Nearly every time I connect anything there's a message telling me that I will do better connecting to a 2.0 port.

The list of ports then presented totals 8, so obviously including the hub, which is rated 2.0.

Something else to just live with?

Your hub is USB 1.1

No, as I said, the hub is rated 2.0.

Should that not be 9 ports?

I've had this kind of setup before, and it worked as USB2... but it was only temporary. I won't put a USB2 disk behind a hub if it can be avoided - why put an extra device in the chain if you don't have to?

Is the hub powered independently or via the USB port it's plugged into?

SD

I have a Seagate external HDD, and the installation requires it to be connected to the rear USB ports ONLY - all my ports are 2.0, but perhaps some are more equal then others....

Physically, the rear ports tend to be sat on the motherboard and so are known to be 2.0-compliant. The front ports are generally connected to the motherboard header by wiring which can sometimes fall out of spec.

Seagate specifies "rear ports" because on some older systems the front ports are 1.1 and the customer doesn't realise this, and on some systems they're 2.0 but cause problems with fast devices (see above). Finally, on some motherboards only the rear ports are root hubs, so anything sensitive to not being connected to a root hub will have problems with the front ports anyway. Finally finally, since the rear ports are root hubs, they are not sharing bandwidth so the external drive can perform as advertised.

Tks for that Bf - now I know....:ok:

I have one of these 2-port USB extenders to present 2 of the the 4 rear USB ports to the front:

http://www.maplin.co.uk/module.aspx?...=1m11#overview

It works fine with USB 2 devices (hard disks & removable storage devices).

SD

Thanks for all the replies.

The hub is powered from the USB port (front) and it sounds as if moving it to the rear port might produce better results.

Certainly plenty of useful info there to consider.

That can often be the problem, as the one port has to power all the devices on the hub, resulting in insufficient voltage to devices. USB devices are sensitive to the voltage available when they negotiate with the port at start. A powered hub might cure the problem, but extending the ports from the rear is a sure-fire fix.

SD