Review on 🔌 Anker 4-Port USB 3.0 Unibody Aluminum Portable Data Hub + 2ft Cable - Compatible with MacBook, Mac Pro/Mini, iMac, XPS, Surface Pro, Notebook PC, USB Flash Drives, Mobile HDD and More by Ryan Gilliam

I am a big fan of Anker products because everything I buy from them is of the highest quality. I have both an Anker 16,000mAh charger and an Anker 5-port wall charger, both work great. One of the sad things about my 2012 Acer laptop is that the company chose to give me only two USB 3.0 ports and the other two only USB 2.0 ports. It was obviously chosen for cost reasons, since USB 3.0 technology was still new at the time. Sorry, I have at least 4 USB 3. 0 devices and don't want my only remaining USB 3.0 port on my laptop to wear out from repeated plugging and unplugging. Anker makes several different models of USB 3.0, there's a plastic 4-port hub, an aluminum 4-port hub like this one, a 7-port hub, and a 13-port hub. I've read reviews of a plastic 4-port hub and many reported overheating issues, so I figured switching to an aluminum hub would be a safer option. I also love that this hub comes with its own built-in 2ft USB cable so I don't have to use the port to connect to my laptop like many other hubs on the market. This device has a certain weight, about 1 pound, what you get in weight due to the aluminum construction, you also get excellent heat dissipation. The device never felt warm and was only slightly warm at times. I also like the fact that the device comes with hook/web velcro strips, it made it easy to secure the hub to my desk so wires from attached cables wouldn't pull it down. I also connected an old USB 2.0 hub to my laptop and it doesn't have the velcro that I mentioned and even with tape the old hub still tries to fall off the table! My computer is a 2.2GHz quad core I7 processor with 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD. I'm using a Linux operating system that doesn't have the typical malware that slows down your Windows system. Any device that I connect to the hub mounts instantly and appears on my screen within 1 second. Linux usually comes with a set of basic utilities that are absolutely essential for any distribution. One of these utilities is called Disks. " Once the drive is mounted, all you have to do is go into the "drives" utility, select the drive to test, then click the gear icon and then select a performance test. For this benchmark I have 2 samples per Selected Read Write and I settled on a solid MIB 1000. I've run this test multiple times, it averages 154-155 MB/s for read speed and 18.8-19 MB/s for write speed. For this test I'm using a Patriot Supersonic XT 16GB Ultra-Fast Flash Drive NOTE: This is a data hub, not a charger If you have a phone, tablet that requires a 2 amp charger or an external 3.5" hard drive is required, this hub will not work for you. If you have such requirements, you'll need to upgrade to Anker's 7-port hub or better, which offers a DC adapter power connection to power the required amplifiers. So far I haven't had any issues with this hub and it has performed as expected. I highly recommend 5 out of 5! UPDATE: December 5, 2018 It's been over a year since I bought this USB hub. and I wanted to give you guys an update on how it's going. Switching to the aluminum version was a very smart decision. in all the time I've had this hub in, it's never overheated for me. It was also very reliable as a hub itself, I was able to stream data from my camera, SSD hard drives and so on. Last November I bought a condenser microphone with phantom amplifier and tripod. However, in order to use it with my laptop, I had to buy a USB sound card to handle the microphone signal, as the laptop's built-in microphone ports cannot handle 48V phantom power. I'm happy to report that this USB hub has done a great job of providing an external audio connection that can handle my USB 3.0 audio needs. If you're looking for a small USB hub that does it all and is reliable, You can't go wrong with a 4 port aluminum hub in my humble opinion. If you need more ports, be sure to buy Anker 7-port or 13-port hubs, but if you only need 4 ports, this is what you need.