Review on 💻 atolla Powered USB Hub 3.0: 4 USB 3.0 Data Ports, 1 USB Charging Port, Individual Power Switches by Sirious Cavalli

I use it to connect redundant external hard drives to my computer and turn them off when not in use, but I don't have to unplug them. It's very compact and very, very light. It doesn't lay flat on a table as the attached cables raise it slightly. I used a few pieces of FunTak on the bottom to hold it firmly against the table - works great! Now I don't have to try to find a place to hold the hub by inserting or pulling cables. During setup, I accidentally pressed one of the power buttons for more than a few seconds while trying to hold the hub (in front of FunTak) and plug in a different USB cable. This disabled one of my hard drives while it was communicating with the PC. When I turned the hard drive back on, it didn't show up on the PC. I turned on another drive connected through a hub and the same result. I plugged the drives directly into the USB port on the PC used for the hub and they didn't work either. AAAAAA! Did a hub just mess up my PC's USB 3.0 port? I plugged a wireless mouse USB dongle into this port and it actually worked. Hmmm - my hard drives should be destroyed! I ran some additional checks and although 2 of my hard drives didn't work, the one I didn't have connected already worked when plugged directly into the PC. I was ready to scrap the Atolla hub, thinking I'd lost a few hard drives and valuable backups as a result! As a last resort, I restarted my computer. Wow, everything worked again. It turned out that the problem with the USB software was due to the hard drive disconnecting. Never seen before. I religiously use the "safely remove hardware and eject media" feature before unplugging hard drives and have had no problems since. The lesson here is: be careful with those power buttons! My phone doesn't register a "fast" charge when plugged into the power outlet, but it seems to charge fast. It does not communicate with a PC when connected to the charging port. The blue power LEDs are small and not overwhelming like some other devices that light up a room! My USB 3.0 transfer speed is about 35Mbps, which is about 10x faster than my USB 2.0 drives. In summary, the hub does what it's designed to do, but it's too light to have no other means of keeping it on the table.