Thanks Chris,

 

    On your “mini-PCI” slot – I don’t think laptops have had those for some 10 years now. It’s all USB port technology in current laptops.

I Didn’t know that Belkin was one of the “bad” choices. The 7-port USB-3 hub I saw at Tiger Direct yesterday, was a Kensington device. There aren’t many choices for USB-3 hubs so far.

 

    What do you think of Kensington for quality of such products – compared to Belkin, etc. ?

 

    The other thing I mentioned was whether the USB-3 hub would throttle down to USB-2 speed to the laptop USB-3 native port,  if ANY client device is a USB-2. The USB-2 hubs are usually constructed with “independent processor chips”, each handling only 2 USB ports, so a 7-port hub would have 4 separate sets of dual USB-2 clients. Assuming that to be also true for the USB-3 version multi-port hub, I wonder if it would be possible to connect USB-2 clients (to  their own chips), and USB-3 clients to the remaining client chip “ports”. A USB-2 and USB-3 client pair would then not be handled by the same chip. Perhaps that scheme might not throttle down the entire hub device when their is a “mixed configuration” on the one hub. In such a scheme, the user might attach his slow USB-2 devices to say one pair of chips, and the faster USB-3 clients to the remaining two chips. Hopefully, the  laptop connection will still go at full USB-3 native speed.

 

    Don’t know enough about USB interfacing to be certain about what would happen with a client USB speed mix. Would be interesting to find out.

 

Joe