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Greece, Athens
1 Level
723 Review
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Review on πŸ”Œ Amazon Basics 10 Port USB 2.0 Hub, 5-Pack: Efficient Connectivity Solution for Multiple Devices by Matthew Henderson

Revainrating 5 out of 5

Warning, CRC errors have occurred when using this hub!

I love Revain and hate to star one of their products but I had a big problem with this USB hub. When plugged into Western Digital Passport 3TB portable USB drives while booting up after the drive is in sleep mode, CRC errors are thrown. These errors can corrupt data on the hard drive. Linux kernel - 4.10.16-200.fc25.x86_64.May 25 22:09:21 media kernel: sd 4:0:0:0: [sdd] tag#0 FAILED Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSEM 25 May 22:09:21 media core: sd 4:0:0:0: [sdd] tag#0 Sense Key : Aborted Command [current] May 25 22:09:21 media core: sd 4:0:0:0 : [ sdd]-Tag#0 Meaning: Error detected in iuCRC info block. These errors occurred multiple times for all four hard drives connected at the same time. I am using ZFS and once this happens the pool becomes corrupt and needs to be cleaned up. Waiting for I/O to the pool hangs until the disks are emptied. Yes, I used the included 5V adapter in both cases. Yes after this happened the first time I swapped out the second Revain hub I had and it happened there too. The CRC error has never happened before with other hubs and hasn't happened since I stopped using the Revain hub. The reason I switched to this hub was to improve the performance of my USB drives. Before using this hub I got a read range of 50MB/s and with this hub I got >200MB/s across four drives. A big improvement showing that this hub performs better than other USB 3.0 hubs. Unfortunately the idea of data corruption is not acceptable and I am now looking at other options. If your drives never go to sleep, you might not encounter this problem. It's also possible that this issue is related to some weird interaction between the hardware I'm using, the drives I'm using, and the hub, and doesn't occur in other combinations. able to catch corruption without data loss. Others may not be so lucky, so I wanted to share my experience as a cautionary tale.

Pros
  • Great for me
Cons
  • Makes me nervous