As someone who has a lot of USB type-A devices connected to my current (Intel) Mac mini, this means I’ll need to buy some new hubs/adapters.
Most of what I have connected are low-, full- and high-speed (USB 2.0) devices, with a few (hard drives) being 5G USB 3 devices. I currently use a 10-port USB 3 hub for most of my devices, which works well. I can of course get a C-to-A adapter to keep using that hub, but I’m wondering if there might be a better option.
Historically, USB 2 hubs can only support 7 devices. Those with more ports form an internal tree of two or more hubs. And each speed tier (USB 1, 2 and 3) typically have separate internal hubs, so the 1.0 devices appear as 1.0 to the computer, 2.0 appears as 2.0 and 3 appears as 3. But it also means there is no bandwidth sharing.
In other words, if I have a 5 Gbit USB 3.0 hub, and I plug 10 high speed devices into it, they will all end up sharing a single 480 Mbit/s USB 2.0 channel, so they’ll all contend for bandwidth.
But I wonder if it is possible for a USB chip to multiplex the data more intelligently. If I have a 3.0 hub and I plug in 10 high speed devices, in theory, it should be able to give each a full 480 Mbit/s, since that aggregate will easily fit within a 5 Gbit/s envelope. And even more devices should be able to share a 10G or 20G USB 3 interface. But (I assume) there would need to be some kind of protocol translation taking place to make all those high speed devices share a superspeed channel.
Does anyone know if hubs like this exist? With type-A ports going away and the overall number of ports being reduced, the need for a large-scale hub (e.g. 20 type-A ports sharing a 20G type-C interface) increases. I, for one, would love to get such a device.
The big difference is that the one you cite has 7 data ports and three high-power charge-only ports. The one I’m using has 10 data ports, with one supporting high-power charging as well.
But as far as I know, it behaves like all other multi-speed USB hubs. All low-, full- and high-speed devices share the 480 Mbps USB 2.0 link. Super-speed devices will share the 5 Gbps USB 3.0 link.
When I upgrade to a new computer that only has type-C ports, I’ll probably just connect this to a C-to-A adapter (and maybe get another one, since I’m currently using all 10 ports). But it would be really nice if some hub would have a chip similar to the one referenced by the article @mschmitt linked:
A chip like that would allow a 10-port hub to run 10 USB 2.0 devices with each getting the full 480 Mbps bandwidth. But I haven’t read about any such devices actually shipping.