Compared to USB 2.0, USB 3.0 is a miracle long overdue. USB 3.0 ups the physical layer rate from the 480Mbit/s to a more reasonable 5Gbit/s – and is on its way to 10Gbit/s, while alleviating shortcomings in power delivery by upping the current limit from 0.5A to 0.9A without the battery charging/supercharging extension. In order to do all of this as cheap as possible without breaking backwards compatibility – they had to introduce a new row of conductors buried inside the A connector and straddling on the side of the various types of B connectors creating cable-compatibility issues – i.e. the USB 3.0 B-connectors will not mate with USB 1.1/2.0 B-sockets
It’s a small price to pay for a drastic increase in performance – no longer are we restricted to seeing rates of 35MB/s and below (sometimes quite significantly lower) when talking to external USB hard drives – we can now attain sequential rates limited by the spinning media in such drives even without UASP – and with UASP to overcome problems with command latency and lack of queueing in the older Bulk-only Transport mode of mass storage, performance improves even more!
But there was always one thing nagging me – while USB 3.0 is obviously great, and the host ports are backward compatible down to USB 2.0 and 1.1, USB 3.0 ports are always rather scarce! I guess we can put this down to cost cutting on behalf of the chipset makers and motherboard manufacturers – high speed USB 3.0 PHYs were not easy to make cheaply, at least initially. But now more USB 3.0 devices can be had at reasonable costs – sometimes even at the same prices as their USB 2.0 bretheren – doesn’t it make sense to have more ports?
To hub, or not to hub?
Before I actually review the device in question – we should probably review whether having a hub is a good idea in the first place.
It’s probably something not often practiced – but you can solve the lack of ports issue with a PCI-E to USB 3.0 adapter. These can be had for about $12 a piece, and if you have free PCI-e x1 slots, it’s definitely a possibility. Unfortunately, these cards usually only offer rear ports, and only two ports – but there’s a big advantage.
A separate controller means a separate USB 3.0 bus! This means stuff attached to the other USB 3.0 ports are not sharing the bus bandwidth. Copying from external drive to external drive can be speeded up quite a bit by attaching them to separate buses – and I practiced this on USB 2.0 quite often – resulting in copies running at 28MB/s rather than a lowly 13MB/s (if attached to the same bus).
Now that you know this “secret” – maybe a hub isn’t the thing for you. If throughput is what matters, look into getting more controllers first!
The other issue is that low quality hubs can often wreak havoc with compatibility with some devices, causing drop outs or “This device can perform faster if attached to a … port” messages. And the bandwidth is shared – so it’s more a convenience thing of not having to plug and unplug devices and being able to address more devices simultaneously.
Also note that bus-powered hubs will often cause problems with devices which are not self powered – as the cable length and traces will cause voltage drop due to resistance – so attaching drives to bus powered hubs is a definitely no-no. Voltage drop will also occur over the back-feed prevention diode (which is sometimes omitted in cheaper hubs).
A self-powered hub (one with a transformer) should be used in this case – but a low quality power supply or poor design of the hub can cause strange device issues or even power back feed issues as well.
In light of this, finding a good hub is important for the reliability of the connection of devices attached to it. But often, good quality hubs can’t be found just by looking at them – some controllers are more tolerant of some timing problems than others. Other hubs can be let down by simple things like poor soldering and poor quality connectors which cause intermittent USB connection.
Hubs can also have an impact on the performance of your older USB 1.1 devices as well. This is because USB 2.0 and 3.0 hubs run a high speed link between the upstream hub/controller and the hub and rely on units called Transaction Translators (TT’s) inside the hub to translate the High Speed (split) transactions into Full Speed packets for USB 1.1 devices. A hub with individual TT’s for each port will essentially give each port’s USB 1.1 bus the full USB 1.1 bandwidth – so older devices can perform to the best of their ability. Some earlier hubs shared one TT amongst all ports to save cost – and on the rationale that older USB 1.1 devices are dwindling in popularity and are unlikely to be connected in large numbers to the hub. Each to their own, I suppose.
The hub in question
The hub in question was purchased from eBay – and seems to be quite popular around eBay. Cost was around $12, and it is a 4-port USB 3.0 hub with a cable. It is bus powered with provision for self-powering, but it does not come with a power supply. Knowing what the quality of some Chinese unbranded power supplies are like – I’d say that might prove to be safer for your devices, but will exclude the possibility of running external hard drives from the hub.
The hub features vertical connection which is rather interesting. The case is black plastic, and there is one LED to indicate the presence of power to the hub (bus or external jack). The plastic shell is held together screwless and gluelessly by internal plastic pins.
So lets open it up.
Taking a look at the PCB, it is already evident that this is a USB 3.0 hub enabled by a Genesys Logic GL3520 USB 3.0 Hub controller with independent transaction translators. Good news, sort of – since Genesys Logic products seem to be fairly decent nowadays, but early on in the USB 1.1 era, I avoided Genesys Logic hubs due to reliability issues.
We also see a Chingis Technology Corporation Pm25ld512 SPI Flash which likely holds the configuration information for the hub. There is also an inductor and a small ChongX capacitor which appears to filter the incoming power – although the capacitor itself is from a questionable manufacturer and seems a bit small for the job. Notably absent are any polyfuses or current measuring shunts – so there is no port over-power protection by the looks of it. But there is an external power backflow prevention diode, and what appears to be a transistor to switch between bus and external power.
There is a QC/warranty sticker sitting over the silkscreen PCB job identifier – so I went ahead and removed it, but am none the wiser as to who is the OEM for this product.
Turning the PCB over – we can see a half decent soldering job with most important pins soldered on well. Unfortunately, it looks like one side of the shell wasn’t soldered down on all ports – it would be wise to solder it down as it provides additional mechanical reinforcement to the ports. Aside from that, there were a few small solder splashes, but I removed the loose solder by hand before taking the photo.
Plugging it in, I found it was functional and identified itself as follows –
- VID 05E3 PID 0610 USB2.0 Hub
- VID 05E3 PID 0612 USB3.0 Hub
This would be expected since USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 are “separated” stack wise, so it’s presenting as two hubs. Self-powered and even low-power devices like USB 3.0 card readers operate flawlessly off the hub – but devices which are a bit more power hungry like my SSD in a box fail to operate properly. Just as expected.
Conclusion
For the price, one cannot complain about it. It does work, although it could do with proper port overcurrent limiting, although this is only a minor safety concern when not powered with external power. The physical construction feels appropriate for the price, although the soldering could do with some help. It does have a backfeed prevention diode, which is good, and it does work with my USB 3.0 ports for low-current-draw devices or self-powered devices. Just don’t expect to power hard drives or DVD writers from it.
Hey there, I have this same kind of hub with GL3520 chipset.
When I connect anything USB 3.0 on it, the device goes to the PID 0610 of the usb hub. So it becomes usb 2.0 instead of 3.0.
Do you have this kind of problem?
I’m always getting this device can perform faster and it’s a pain in the ass to get usb 3.0 speeds here.
Of the two hubs I have, I haven’t had this issue when attaching any of my external hard disks or card readers. I mostly use the hubs with the Renesas/NEC chipset – maybe there could be compatibility issues with it, but more likely is that you may have a dud hub. It could be the case that the crystal oscillator responsible for the signal timing is out of specification (or very close to the limits), causing the issue, or otherwise the extra USB 3.0 contact pins aren’t making complete contact. You can try switching cables, and ensuring you push the cable in all the way. If it still doesn’tmwork, I would chalk it up to an incompatibility probably due to a bordeline crystal.
Where are you getting Renesas hubs? Surely you’re not hiding a secret stash of USB 3 Renesas hubs from us?!
Wish I were … but nope. The Renesas hubs I’ve got come from the USB 2.0 era … oddly enough, it’s been over a decade and they still serve reliably every day!
– Gough
I also have a GL3520 based Hub, and had many troubles getting USB 3 speeds.
It turned out I had an ancient Renesas 3.0 driver for my USB3 host controller.
After updating to a more recent version, things started working better.
At first I thought the old driver caused the hub to enumerate on the wrong controller, but after reading your explanation about the HW appearing as two separate hubs, I realized it simply mapped as a USB2 hub on the USB2 hub tree of the same Renesas controller to which it was hooked up.
After upgrading the driver, the Hub is now recognized as a USB 3 device and maps to the USB 3 host controller tree as a USB3 HUB.
BTW, Microsoft’s USBview utility is pretty useful.
http://www.ftdichip.com/Support/Utilities.htm#USBView
i have a similar usb 3.0 with the same gl3520 chipset but switches for each port.
my problem is: usb 3.0 devices are working properly, after i changed the usb 3.0 cable of the hub with a good one.
but connected usb 2.0 devices are limited to 1 mb/s full speed, no high speed transfer is possible.
usb 2.0 devices work in usb 1.0 mode only. very sad.
a firmware update seems to be available. i found an gl3520 updater, which made even more trouble..
You may have a compatibility issue with your USB3 controller (see if there are any driver or firmware update for it) or just an unlucky, poorly manufactured unit (with possibly a marginal timing crystal). Unfortunate, but it happens. For the record, all three of mine are operating all speeds just fine attached to Intel or Renesas/NEC USB3 ports.
Such hub and such problem. USB 3.0 devices works after replacing cable. USB 2.0 works at speed 1 Mb/s.
I try to separate shell cover using penis, now very sore. Still does not work.
ThanX for the good review – I always like to see the PCB and chips inside.
I have device 05e3:0616 7-port USB3.0 ext.powered, cheap Hub with 2x 4-port chips connected inside. It works OK with 480Mb/s ext.HDD.
With 5Gb/s HDD, my large file transfers sometimes abort (Ubuntu14.04). I’m not sure that it`s the hub, still trying to nail down the problem. The host controller is NEC/Renesas, the HDD is WD black series (512 byte sectors) inside USB3.0 enclosure from Trancend (the original HDD was Samsung, which I uh/oh! dropped from 1 meter). So it could be enclosure/HDD compatibility issue. Since the GenesysLogic usb3.0 chips are tested to work, what left is eventually PSU, filtering, impedance matching…
I am convinced that this specific gadget it is USB 2.0 speaking of output ports, and only input this is somewhat USB 3.0 compatible so this to feed USB 2.0 ports at high bandwidth.
Possible I am the only one with eyes and able to see that output ports are plain USB 2.0 connector with just four pins.
Do not waste your time with downloads and hardware inspection, some one in China aiming to rip-off people by selling a gadget this coming with allot fake advertising.
If you are smart and quick, just request full refund from the Ebay shop that you got it from.
USB\vid_05e3&Pid_0610 Rev_9223
The hub shown in the original blog post has USB 3.0 ports. You can clearly see the extra 5 pins on the connectors, and you can also see the 5 pins soldered on the PCB. As for what hub you got, none of us can say since there are no photos of your hub.
https://www.ittsb.eu/forum/index.php?topic=1254.0
Thanks for the photos! You’re right, your hub does seem to not really have USB3 ports. Frankly I’m fairly surprised they bothered to put contacts on the other since it seems more likely people would notice the lack of contact inside the visible socket, rather than cracking open the hub to check the PCB, but maybe there’s some reason for it.
Anyway, I’ve seen the hubs with switches before. Always avoided them because I wasn’t confident they knew what they were doing when they added a switch. Seems there’s another reason to avoid them.
Still while you have our sympathies, as I said what you found doesn’t seem to apply to the hub Lui Gough bought whatever its other flaws.
BTW, did you check the chipset of your hub? Other than the fact we can see the extra USB3.0 pins on both the PCB end and the socket end of Lui Gough’s hub, their hub also had a USB 3 chipset.
I assume you one would be a USB 2 chipset. At least, I can’t imagine why anyone would bother to put a USB 3 chipset if they are only going to attach USB2 ports since the savings on the port must be tiny compare to everything else. I guess maybe if they are picking up reject chips that don’t work with USB3 for some reason?
Actually although I thought you were right about your hub, I had another look and now I’m not so sure. It’s not very easy to see due to the angle, but I think the 5 extra pins on are on the sockets of your USB hub as well. I can see 5 dips where I would expect the pins to be. Are you sure there aren’t 5 contacts there? Remember that a USB socket is different from a USB plug. For the USB plug, the 5 extra pins are at the back of the plug. These mate with the USB socket in the front where there are 5 contacts below the level of the plastic. To help, try looking at your computer’s USB 3 socket or simply take a look at the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_3.0 which has photos. For that matter, you can also see how the socket looks like in Lui Gough’s photos.
Remember that the sockets and plugs are backwards compatible. So you can plug a USB 2 port into a USB 3 socket and a USB 3 plug into a USB 2 socket with the only problem no Super Speed. But I’m fairly sure adding extra contacts was never considered with the original USB A plug or socket design so they needed to be retrofitted in.
If I’m right, then problems you’re having with USB 3 are for some reasons other than a simple lack of contacts. My earlier point may still apply. My understanding is high speed digital signal design is complicated and I don’t have confidence that whoever added those switches knew what they were doing. If the signal goes through them I could imagine it causing problems. (To be clear, I fully agree there are a lot of shoddy products out of cheap Chinese manufacturers.) On a personal level those switches seem cool but then I think about it and feel I’d never actually use them.
Also explains the confusion in my reply yesterday. Like why someone would make sockets with connections on the PCB end but not the socket end. I mean guess this could have done this to fool the socket buyer. But although theoretically you could save money by producing a socket with connections for the PCB but no connections on the socket end, it doesn’t seem likely a productive scenario since you won’t save that much. And most business purchasing these sockets are likely to notice. Either when someone looks at the socket e.g. to test it or when they test the end device. I know a lot of crazy things go on, but a socket with contacts for the PCB but none on the socket end, sounds like one of those crazy stories like plastic rice. (Discounting sockets made for some test or demonstration which cost more than genuine USB 3 sockets).
BTW, did you check the chipset of your hub? …… Use my driver USB\vid_number for your research.
Most buyers of this item they aim to enhance Smart-phone transfer speed for large video files. Samsung Galaxy PC driver always nag that this device (Galaxy S5) it does support higher USB speed.
If you hub stays USB2.0 on usb3 bus, then you should check whether there is a SPI Flash chip soldered on the PCB. 512 Kbit is pretty enough for this hub, chip is 25LD512 or compatible. If you have the flash, then there is a leaked firmware upgrade tool, which may fix the problem. Beware that everything working with firmware can contain viruses inside….
Thank you for this tecnical tip.
What is my advice to all people in such situations, this is to avoid fiddling with firmware updates, because this will turn in to a brick any copycat produced chip.
Therefore from consumer point of view, it is best to keep this toy as is and to buy a branded and reliable USB 3.0 hub for serious work.
Your comment doesn’t make much sense. If your cheap hub isn’t working properly and you brick it, who cares? The whole point is it’s a cheap hub and it’s not working properly so it doesn’t matter so much if it breaks. I mean you could keep it and use it as a USB2.0 hub, but what for?
Further if you do this when you first bought the hub, then if it bricks you can just report it as dead to the vendor and ask for a refund or replacement. It’s better than trying to convince them it’s not working properly because it’s stuck on USB2. OTOH if you upgrade it and it now works properly. you now have a working hub. You can still call it a toy if you want, but it’s a better toy than it was.
Incidentally, the reason I’m looking for a new USB 3.0 hub is because my ‘branded and reliable’ USB 3.0 hub died. Sure I was offered a refund. But because I don’t live in the US, not a replacement. I can order another off Amazon but I will have to pay for shipping so it’s not free. Sure I could have ordered one locally but then instead of paying 3x for the ‘branded and reliable’ hub I’d be paying 10x or more.
‘Branded and reliable’ hubs (as with many products) are generally better and have better long term support made but they are very often using the same chips as the cheap ones and particularly if you live outside the US or Western Europe, the support isn’t that much better and they can be quite expensive.
You do have to be careful when buying off eBay or AliExpress but if you’re smart you can get acceptable products. (For example, regarding point above about pin count, well even if you don’t look at the pin count a basic thing to check when you get a USB3.0 hub is to make sure you’re actually getting USB3.0 speeds, and on all ports.)
Came across this review again and since it was one I looked at during my research, wanted to mention my own interesting experience with a cheap USB 3.0 hub. I bought 2 different ones. One was a simple 4 port. The other was a 7 port. The vendor seemed to imply it came with a PSU but in reality it only came with a PSU connector, which for the reasons given by Lui Gough is probably safer anyway. And I do have a bunch of USB PSUs bought from reliable local retailers which I could use if needed.
The 4 port seemed to be fine, no major problems for my use.
The 7 port was another matter. At first, I thought it didn’t work at all. Anything you plug into it seemed to have an error. USB 2 or USB 3. I tried it on different computers to test for some weird incompatibility with my USB chipset, ultimately trying at least Intel USB 3.0, AMD USB 3.0 and Etron PCI Express USB 3.0. Didn’t work with any.
But then I found that if you connected at least one device to the first 3 ports before you plugged it in, those ports would work fine. You could plug in and out devices. You would need to leave at least one device connected but otherwise it was fine. Ports 4-7 never really worked. AFAIK, most 7 ports hubs basically have 2x 4 port hub chipsets. One of them is connected to one of the output ports of the other so I suspect there may be some relation. I never got around to trying to update the firmware of anything. Was thinking of opening one and seeing if there were any obvious flaw but never got around to it.
And unfortunately I was a bit busy at the time so let the AliExpress dispute period time out. I spoke to the vendor anyway and they wanted me to return the hub. Except I live in NZ and returning the hub to China would cost about the same as buying a new one. Eventually they said I could buy another one for a reduced price. I decided to risk that. But it had the exact same problem! Don’t see how others wouldn’t encounter the issue so can only assume that they had a bad batch, I probably should have gone with a more active seller. Anyway this time I complained in well enough time. However I think because I;d filed a few recent disputes, despite all with photographic or video evidence, AliExpress decided I was misusing the system and blocked my account. Tried complaining but at the time there didn’t seem to be a real way to appeal so gave up. (They had a live chat, but although the people would say they were sending it higher up, nothing happened.) Annoying but the amount I save from the 4 port hub mostly made up with the loss from the 7 port hub, not to mention other savings over the years.
I have a PCIe x1 USB 3.0 card with 4 external Type A ports, one internal Type A port and a 20 pin internal header for two front ports.
The controller chip is a Renesas D720201. There’s also a Genesys GL3520 chip. Examining the traces to the ports shows the 20 pin header and the upper two external ports connect to the GL3520 hub chip. The internal Type A and lower two external connect directly to the Renesas chip.
Now for the weird stuff. The lower two external ports were SLOW, no matter what I connected to them. Some looking around in Device Manager showed they were logically connected to a Standard Enhanced USB hub, aka USB 2.0. Devices connected to the front ports or upper two external ports were shown as being connected to a Super Speed Hub, USB 3.0.
So I dug around to find the latest drivers and firmware for the D720201, both released circa 2012. Install the driver first (which surprisingly Windows 10 build 1903 did not block) then the firmware.
Now only *some* devices get hooked up wrong, specifically my two Seagate 4TB Backup Plus drives. They’re 15mm thick 2.5″. Other drives that it formerly ran at slow speed transfer data much faster.
That has me wondering, since the Renesas chip is working properly through the Genesys chip, if I plug a hub with a GL3520 chip into one of the lower ports, would that alleviate the problems the Renesas chip has with proper use of its own root hub?
I’d love to find a PCIe x1 USB 3.0 card with a Fresco Logic chip. They’ve released drivers as recently as 2019 for their chip on my motherboard from 2011.
There’s a possibility that there is something improper with the design of the PCB that might mean that the directly connected ports may have marginal or poor signal quality on the super-speed pairs, leading USB 3.0 devices to instead connect at USB 2.0 rates. I have had instances where long cables (e.g. front panel connectors) caused USB 3.0 devices to go flaky and be fast for a bit but drop out. Some devices are more tolerant than others, however, and there is a slim chance that the Genesys Logic controller could have more forgiving PHY transcievers that might be able to handle poor signal quality more gracefully. I would not count on it, however, as it might manifest as new problems like devices dropping out during large file transfers.
I’ve not encountered an add-in board with a Fresco Logic controller, so I cannot advise.
– Gough
But it’s only some devices that hook up at 2.0 speed. I have a generic USB 3.0 SATA enclosure with Asmedia 1051 chip, and it has a 64K flash chip on the PCB. Connect to a front or upper rear port and it has 100+ megabyte per second transfer speed. Plug it into a lower rear port and it runs as fast as USB 2 can possibly go, with the popup from Windows about it working faster if plugged into a 3.0 port.
That is not unexpected.
USB 3.0 (3.1, 3.2) are all very finnicky and demanding when it comes to the quality of the PCB, filtering ferrite beads, cable and connectors. A lot of low cost products, especially ordered direct from China, are USB 3.0 “compatible” but not certified through the USB-IF. They are hence likely to be more borderline. Even simple USB 3.0 devices frequently do not pass first time (as I’ve heard from various engineers and test-equipment manufacturers) due to the stringent design and manufacturing requirements. I’ve seen this myself – the same enclosure with a different cable can go from being unstable and dropping out to working just fine. I’ve also had instances of firmware incompatibilities where something that works just fine on one series of Intel xHCI controllers fails to reliably work on AMD or Renesas.
This is just life when it comes to low-cost USB devices, and it happened in the USB 2.0 era too with some devices being so out of spec that it would use 1.1 rates instead. It is the price of “low cost” and lax certifications.
– Gough
After *a lot* of digging around, I found the Inatek KTU3FR-5O2I which uses a Fresco Logic chip. Just got a message back from Inatek it’s the FL1100.
I did find that one USB 3.0 drive running slow was due to an iffy cable. Changed the cable and it was running at the speed it should, so the other cable went in the trash.