Review on Anker 3-Port USB 3.0 HUB with Gigabit Ethernet Converter (3 USB 3.0 Ports, RJ45 Gigabit Ethernet, Windows XP, Vista, Win7/8 (32/64 bit), Mac OS 10.6+, Linux) - Black by Marshall Lindner

available For testing purposes in this test I connected 2 PCs to a gigabit switch. PC1 used an Intel I219-V Ethernet adapter while PC2 used an Anker3 port USB hub + Ethernet adapter. The ethernet adapter used in the USB hub has a model number: RTL8153 I have used this USB hub + gigabit ethernet adapter several times. It's been a few months now and so far the speed has been great and the reliability decent. It can support around 940Mbps download bandwidth, so almost full gigabit bandwidth after the overhead. Download throughput was greater, although it could still average almost 900 Mbit/s. When trying to fully saturate upload and download, the ethernet controller in the USB hub resets itself, so it is not fully able to handle the load fully saturating upload and download at the same time, even though it is responsible for the sent in a few milliseconds and received a total throughput of 1.4 Gbps, although the adapter kept crashing. My final test was to see how the adapter would handle me. Reformulating linear reads on a USB 3 flash drive at a maximum speed of 200MB/s while saturating download bandwidth on the Ethernet controller. If you look at the attached screenshot, we can see that the Ethernet adapter takes precedence on this device. The moment I run the boot test, the read speed on the flash drive connected to the device's USB hub drops instantly from 200 MB/s to 158 MB/s. For example, this is an expected problem when connecting multiple devices to a hub (in the case of this USB hub, 3 USB ports, 1 ethernet adapter, and about 1MB of internal ROM that contains drivers for older versions of Windows in general) to work between all devices on the USB hub with a total bandwidth of about 300 MB/s and the Ethernet adapter gets the highest priority for this available bandwidth. Overall I give 4 out of 5 stars. My reason for removing an asterisk is that it's probably a device firmware issue where trying to fully saturate and drain the ethernet controller at the same time causes the adapter to reboot. The hub remains connected, but the Ethernet controller is disconnected from the PC and then reconnected. With normal use, I did not encounter this problem, since such saturation of the network adapter rarely happens. In this case, it's still an issue as no other gigabit ethernet adapters I've tested have encountered such an issue. This device is suitable for a system that might only have 1 or 2 USB ports where you need additional ports for a few slower devices (e.g. external hard drive, ethernet, + keyboard and mouse) but if you need something like that like connecting multiple devices with high bandwidth at once, for example an external hard drive + capture card, then it most likely will not cope with such a load. If it was USB 3.1 Gen 2 we could handle this kind of workload, but with the limited bandwidth of USB 3.0 we can't use a high-bandwidth multi-device hub.