Review Sabrent 4 Port Portable USB 3.0 Hub

I am reviewing the The Sabrent HB-B4U3, 4-port, USB3.0 hub. This is a non-powered hub but has a power port on it. No advice is provided in the description how to purchase the power adapter should you decide to get one later on.

The hub is sturdily built, almost a little chunky. It's a plastic housing with brushed aluminum top. There is an attached 8" USB cable that is quite stiff and caused me a little bit of a hassle because I could not really place the hub exactly where I wanted since the stiff cable always wanted to "pull" the hub around to where -it- wanted.

The USB3.0 specification allows data transfer speeds up to 5Gbps. Most computer USB 3.0 ports will honor that spec as well as provide 900mA of power. Consequently since this is a bus powered hub, you must not attempt to plug in devices that would want to draw more than 900mA otherwise they won't work properly, if at all. In particular, if you have a USB external drive connected, it is unlikely that you would be able to attach a second USB external drive or USB Thumb Drive as you would probably exceed the capacity of the bus.

However you can handily attach devices to all 4 ports if they are stingy on power consumption... keyboards, mice, digital cameras, etc.

The performance of this hub was excellent. I was able to use this without any issues on both my MacBook Pro and an Asus laptop with both USB3 and USB2 ports (it is backwards compatable with USB2). I successfully used an external USB drive with this as well as being able to transfer photos from my iPhone to iPhoto on my computer. It also worked well with all other devices I hooked up to it.

It is quite sturdy in construction but not necessarily the most compact hub. My only gripe was the excessively stiff attached USB cable.

For the price I think it is a pretty good value.

I was provided a sample for review.

Review from Mr Erb.Thanks for watching.