USB 3 hub for linux

I am looking for a pluggable USB 3 hub which works flawlessly on Linux, Let me know if you have some suggestions

This company looks interesting for USB stuff:

https://plugable.com/

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What would you consider to be “flawlessly?”

For example, do you need hub-ctrl to work correctly on a port-by-port basis? Do you only need USB 3.1gen1 (or what ever they’ve renamed it for USB 4) speeds? Do you mind if the hub box actually has more than 1 hub chip inside? Do you care about who the vendor of the hub chip is? Do you need LEDs to indicate port status?

@bradfa – welcome to TMPDIR!

Sounds like you have some experience with USB :slight_smile:

Thanks for your reply, I am not worried about what is inside the box as long as it works. LEDs are nice to have but not essential. Right now ports I have are USB 3 mainly but I wont mind newer spec as long as it is backward compatible. my usecase is to connect

  1. embedded boards which are USB powered
  2. connect devices like USB Mics
  3. USB serial devices
  4. Keyboards and Mice

I have had some extenders which were not externally powered and it would work sometimes and would not work other times. Then I bought externally powered hub which does better but it is a USB2 hub

so essentially as a user I wanted to find something that would work reliably without worrying about such intermittent failures and my primary desktop is running Arch Linux so it should work well with Linux based Operating system.

I have a Vantec 7 port USB 3.0 hub which seems to be working well for me. It only supports up to USB 3.1g1 speeds (5Gbps) but that’s fine for my needs.

Internally it’s actually a daisy chained pair of 4 port GenesysLogic hubs. It seems to have per-port power control and I can control each port individually using hub-ctrl. Although as I’ve found on other hubs (mainly SMSC/Microchip ICs), using hub-ctrl to “power off” a port doesn’t fully disconnect the device but merely when you “power on” the port it does a reset and quickly properly disconnects and reenumerates. When hub-ctrl puts a port in to the “off” state the corresponding LED does turn off on the actual hub.

Currently I have 2 FTDI adapters and 2 Atmel SAMA5 boards connected to it. The Atmel boards are not powered by it, they have their own power supplies, but Vantec claim 1.5A per port output current.

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thanks for the hub recommendation – looks like a nice device. I had a number of problems (USB errors, etc) with a Amazon basics USB 3 hub I tried some time back.

Should try it again as I’m still using USB 2.0 hubs for my lab setup. Really like the D-link 2.0 hub as I can get a lot of cables in a small space.

I have a long standing desire to design my own hub PCB due to not being able to find a proper hub that works correctly and simply for all my needs. Being able to really turn off the 5VBUS power to a port via hub-ctrl and having useful LEDs being the 2 top things I’ve not been able to find in off the shelf hubs. Knowing that a USB 2.0 hub has a translator per port is a guessing game with off the shelf hubs, at least USB 3.0 seems to have mandated this for hub chips.

So far I’ve just not had the free time to do the design work.

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thanks @bradfa let us know if you get this designed. I might buy it :slight_smile:

Interesting USB 2 hub: https://www.crowdsupply.com/capable-robot-components/programmable-usb-hub

@cbrake it seems to be promising, I guess it will complement my usecase really well. I have multiple boards that I would like to keep running near by and run CI on them. Whats you take ?

What functionality are you looking for in a hub to make your board farm work better?

@cbrake basically power the boards and have serial console are mainly what I am looking for. If I could get a remote switch to power-cycle that would be even better :slight_smile:

For boards (like rPI) that are powered by 5V, seems a USB hub is a good switchable power supply. What would be neat is to have a little board that would pass USB-A through to connect to USB serial, and then also breakout power to second USB port that would would not have signals – just power for powering the board.

It seems some of the boards, like the uC SAMA5D27 board, can be powered by the USB serial console power, so nothing special required there.

Do you have many boards that require something other than 5V?