IB-HUB1436-CPD: klein aber fein USB hub
Published:
The hub is exactly what I wanted: a bare-bones, no-nonsense device that does what it needs to do, and nothing else. It splits one USB-C port into two USB-A and two USB-C ports, and that's it. There are no useless HDMI ports, no DisplayPort, no subpar Ethernet adapters, no nothing; just USB ports.
Nifty little device
I was looking for something that would give me a couple more USB ports on my PC. Many hubs try to give you everything, mit Pommes dazu. The problem with this approach is that the everything you get may be unnecessary at best, frequently subpar (as my experience with StarPort's Ethernet adapter shows), and useless at worst—but you still have to pay for all the extras. Sometimes a monster kitchen sink of a hub is what you want and that is perfectly fine, but sometimes you need a focused device.
IB-HUB1436-CPD is exactly such a device. What it offers is simple:
- two USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 ports
- two USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 ports
- one USB-C non-detachable cable to connect the hub to a PC
- one USB-C port, for optional power delivery (if you are using the hub with a laptop)
USB-A variant
I have considered getting the IB-HUB1424-C3 variant, but decided against it since I have a couple USB-C devices and would rather connect them directly than with a C-to-A converters. The speed difference of USB 3.2 Gen 2 over 3.2 Gen 1 is also nice, but I do not expect to actually take advantage of it—it's not like a keyboard and a mouse need 10 Gbit/s...
Other options
There are two more hubs I have looked at.
The first was the IB-HUB1450-C31 variant, with 10 USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 ports. A reasonable thing to get, if I had that many USB-C devices, but I do not.
The second was an absolute fucking unit of a hub, which I only looked at out of sheer astonishment and curiosity. In a classic corporate fashion, RaidSonic must have been so preoccupied with whether they could that they did not stop to think whether they should. The result is the IB-HUB1720-U3.
It is a 20 port hub.
Sure, it only offers 5 Gbit/s USB-A ports, but there's almost two dozen of them! To be completely honest, I may get one of these as decoration, just for the hell of it.
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