Picked a $22 Rosewill USB hub over a $60 powered dock for my bench, now I'm second guessing it
I've been rebuilding my bench setup at the shop in Aurora and needed more ports for flashing drives and running diagnostics. I grabbed a $22 Rosewill 7 port hub instead of a $60 powered dock because I figured the drives get their own power anyway. Three boards in I'm getting random dropouts on larger transfers and it's making me wonder if I cheaped out. Anyone run into this and did a powered dock actually fix it for you?
Are the dropouts happening on the same board every time or does it move around? If it follows the board then you're chasing a bad cable or a flaky port, not the hub itself. The thing with bus powered hubs is all 7 ports share whatever your PC can push out, so a flash that spikes current can brown out the whole thing even if the drive has its own power brick. What size transfers are we talking, like a few gigs or full image writes?