USB port sharing?

[Cary B. Cornett]

As part of my Incredible Shrinking Road Rig, I am using a laptop that has only two USB ports. One of these is for the equipment rack (4 spaces, instead of the former 6), another for the external hard drive (lets me run sessions on the studio computer without copying files first), and the third is for my BCF2000 fader pack.

Oh. Right. Three things, only two ports. Guess I need a hub to expand. Only... I don't think having the HD and the rack sharing a port is a good idea (bandwidth squeeze, lots of collisions). Either of those is USB2, while the fader pack is, I think, USB1. Does sharing a USB port between slower and faster devices create possible problems? Or am I just worrying too much?

[cgrafx]

As part of my Incredible Shrinking Road Rig, I am using a laptop that has only two USB ports. One of these is for the equipment rack (4 spaces, instead of the former 6), another for the external hard drive (lets me run sessions on the studio computer without copying files first), and the third is for my BCF2000 fader pack.

Oh. Right. Three things, only two ports. Guess I need a hub to expand. Only... I don't think having the HD and the rack sharing a port is a good idea (bandwidth squeeze, lots of collisions). Either of those is USB2, while the fader pack is, I think, USB1. Does sharing a USB port between slower and faster devices create possible problems? Or am I just worrying too much?

If you put a slow speed USB device on a high-speed port, it will slow the entire port down to the slow speed. So you definitely do NOT want to share USB 1 devices on the same port as USB 2 devices.

******** EDIT **************

This was bothering me bit so I had to go look it up. If you use a decent USB 2 hub, you can mix and match the slower USB 1.1 devices with the faster 2.0 devices and they should not interfere with each other.

Accordingly Powered USB hubs are also recommended over non-powered ones.

see: http://www.everythingusb.com/hi-speed-usb.html


A powered hub is always preferable to unpowered.
USB hub ports are not as capable or flexible as real PC ports so it's best not to expect the world of them.
USB 1.1 (obsolete) hubs will work fine on USB 2.0 ports, but they cannot utilize USB 2.0 capabilities. They will default to slower speeds.
Hi-Speed and Full/Low-Speed USB devices can coexist nicely on USB 2.0 hubs. Connecting such a hub to a USB 2.0 port is recommended.
USB 2.0 hubs can be used on older USB 1.1 computers.
Although it is said that you can cascade up to 4 hubs, problems may start to arise after two hubs, it's best to minimize hub usage if possible.
Many USB devices don't work well on hubs. Cameras, scanners and especially USB drives are known to have problems with hub connectivity.
Remember that active USB extensions are really just one-port hubs.

[RBIngraham]

You'll be fine if you get yourself a decent powered USB hub. Put the harddrive and BCF on that hub.

If your laptop has any type of a card slot consider getting a USB controller card and put that in there. That is what I use on my laptop to get USB3.

Speaking of which, that is the real question you probably want to ask yourself at some point. Should I just get a laptop with native USB3 ports on it. I can tell you it does make a difference. I have a USB3 hub that I plug into my Expresscard USB Controller. When I'm at the home office, I have as many as 4 hard drive type device plugged into that hub and they can all transfer data among each other very quickly. (one is portable SSD, two full size external spinners and a high capacity thumb drive I use to transfer files on site)
I then keep my audio interface on the laptops own USB ports and the only thing it shares with is a mouse or the occasional USB2 thumb drive, optical drive (which I removed from my laptop to put in a 2nd HDD), etc..