Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsDead at 5 Months - After slowly failing and losing functionality - replacement never sent
Reviewed in the United States on October 22, 2016
After I wrote my original review Anker contacted me and said they were going to send me a replacement. But they never did.
To summarize :
- Dead after 5 months of daily use.
- Although at first it worked with external hard drives, it soon stopped working with first the large drive. The issue was it no longer found the hard drive regardless of hub port used.
- Next it did not recognize the small external hard drive
- After 5 months of gradually breaking down it went completely dead
- Stayed dead
- DO NOT USE FOR EXTERNAL HARD DRIVES!!!
- While it worked it was OK for light use. For example, transfer filed from camera to hard drive then unplug camera.
I bought it thinking it would help expand laptop USB 3.0 connections because the MacBook Pro had 1 USB 3.0 (and 1 USB 2.0). But this Anker could not handle the job. So it stopped recognizing the external drives after about a month. OK that's the way it goes, but the whole thing went dead after I unplugged external drives. I never found a USB 3.0 hub that can handle external drives. Apparently, it's better to daisy chain Firewire drives (if you can afford them).
This is only good for light peripherals like a flash thumb drive or transferring data from a camera. Even then it's not built to last so plan to buy a new one. Complete waste of 50 bucks for me. I guess it looks nice. Maybe for a paperweight. Kind of big for a bracelet. Sometimes I think I should go back to school for electronics and learn to build my own peripherals like this because then maybe they might work for awhile.
Anyways, a 10 port hub is kind of a useless thing to get because the more things you try to run at one time, the slower everything goes. If you need more than one USB 3.0 device connected at a time, you're better off with a desktop that has the hub ports built in or finding another solution. I should probably look at a NAS solution but it's more than 50 bucks. And the USB 3.0 hub cannot be near your USB 2.0 devices or hubs. That's a genuine problem. It didn't have to be but manufacturers did not bother with shielding - just let the consumer figure it - by reading the USB technical specifications - WTF do normal people do? Why make technology so difficult for consumers?
Original Review
October 22 2016
"For low energy peripherals only, don't kid yourself that it will be reliable with external hard drives. It won't."
Worked great for 5 months then stopped finding my external drive, then stopped working at all and temperature became burning hot even when not plugged into USB port. I did not notice the warning, "For a stable connection, don't use this hub with high power-consumption devices, such as external hard drives." before purchase. The first drive it wouldn't read was a Seagate Expansion Drive 5TB with its own power supply. Eventually it stopped working with a small Seagate Desktop Plus slim drive which powered via USB. The big drive must be sucking power even with its own power supply because it works fine connected directly to laptop. Not sure if any Mac OS upgrades could have been involved. Big drive stopped working with Anker hub on September 30, but I have not upgraded fromEl Capitan to Sierra yet. Yet since the hub worked great for transferring camera data from various canon and apple cameras/devices before it stopped working altogether I have to give it a couple stars. Maybe it deserves 5 stars if you never connect an external hard drive and only use it for data transfer, headsets and light usage peripherals. But now it just heats up hot enough to hurt my hand and doesn't transfer anything. I haven't contacted Anker yet. It's not really what I need because the big drive is for Time Machine, the smaller drive for extra space, then a bunch of peripherals. Of course if you have a USB 2.0 mouse that will not work with this hub because of the problems with USB 3.0 and Bluetooth, so don't plug into this hub. You have to keep this USB 3.0 hub as far away from your USB 2.0 Bluetooth plug as physically possible. And consider EMI shielded cables. That took some research to sort out. What a bloody mess. I don't know how the average non-techie gets this stuff to work ever.
