Any hope for USB hubs?

[Brian Gordon]

Running on a late 2011 MacBook Pro, with 2 USB ports. That can be a
problem at times. I see USB/USB-3 hubs for sale. Might they help, or
are there other bandwith issues to deal with?

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In article <pea5q7$htb$1...@panix2.panix.com>, Brian Gordon

<bri...@panix.com> wrote:

> Running on a late 2011 MacBook Pro, with 2 USB ports. That can be a
> problem at times. I see USB/USB-3 hubs for sale. Might they help, or
> are there other bandwith issues to deal with?

help with what? what peripherals are you wanting to connect?

that macbook doesn't have usb 3, so save your money and get a powered
usb 2 hub.

a usb 3 hub will certainly work and be useful with another computer,
but won't make a difference (other than bus power) with that macbook.

it also has firewire 800 and thunderbolt, so you can easily chain
firewire hard drives and/or get a thunderbolt dock with a variety of
ports.

[David Empson]

It is worth emphasising that a Thunderbolt dock with USB 3.0 ports will
give you USB 3.0 on a 2011 Mac, because the dock contains its own USB
controller.

For example, I have a CalDigit Thunderbolt Station which I bought for my
2013 MacBook Pro. It has Thunderbolt 1 in/out, three USB 3.0 ports,
HDMI, Ethernet and audio. That dock works fine on the Early 2011 MacBook
Pro I subsequently got second hand. There was a similar dock from Belkin
at the time.

You may need to install support files and/or run a new enough OS X
version to allow all features of the dock to work - if I remember right,
OS X supported the CalDigit dock from shortly after the release of 10.9
but drivers were needed for 10.8.x. There was still one driver needed to
enable extra power output for the dock's USB ports (e.g. for faster
charging of an iPhone or iPad).

I subsequently bought an OWC Thunderbolt 2 dock, which has more ports
than the CalDigit (including adding a Firewire port for later models
which don't have one). I have used it briefly on the 2011 MacBook Pro:
it works but the extra speed of Thunderbolt 2 is wasted because the 2011
models only have Thunderbolt 1.

If you can find a cheaper Thunderbolt 1 dock, it would give you plenty
of extra ports, but if you can only find Thundebolt 2 docks, they will
work fine. (Don't get a Thunderbolt 3 dock - it requires an extra
adapter, will cost a lot more overall, and you won't benefit from the
extra speed.)

Any variant of Thunderbolt dock is going to cost more than a USB 2.0 hub
(or even a USB 3.0 hub) so if your only problem is needing to plug in
more than two USB peripherals and you aren't concerned about speed, then
a powered USB 2.0 hub would be sufficient.

--
David Empson
dem...@actrix.gen.nz