Is there a USB 3.0 Hub that really works with the Mac Mini?

Yes, the Orico unit only contained 85.71 version firmware so I sent it back today.

*sighs*

The "Pluggable" units do not appear to be available from Amazon UK.

Contrary to an earlier comment about USB 3 hubs working in a Windows environment but not in the Mac do not believe this at all. I have spent the best part of a day testing two different USB 3 hubs on 4 different PCs (Win 7). I have a pair of backup drives and if a drive is disconnected and then connected again it is highly unlikely to be detected again until the hub AND the drive are disconnected and reconnected again. This tends to make the point of USB somewhat useless. Sometimes the drives aren't detected at all which actually makes the USB 3 hub dangerous (I'll try again tomorrow after a reboot of everything). There is something really really wrong with USB 3 technology so I am going to step back for another year and try again later.

As a project now on the back burner I might play around with trying to find firmware levels of hubs as that may have some relevance.

I have just had this hassle with CF cards and their controllers.

It is a sorry saga of standards not being followed, too much haste to get to market, insufficient testing and basically greed causing all this.

Intel's OWN REPORTS show that USB3 is a loser, due to interference with and from hundreds of common 2.4GHz devices.

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/io/universal-serial-bus/usb3-frequency-in terference-paper.html

I now have a metal-cased HooToo 4 port USB3 hub, but even then, I had to use Copper Tape to further insulate and ground the box and cable into it.

AVOID USB3 if you use WiFi, wireless mice, wireless headsets, or any other devices that use the very common 2.4GHz bands. I do not use Bluetooth at all, so not sure about those.

I just read that report. So not only are there issues with USB 3 actually working between chips/firmware etc it also interferes with wireless !

USB 3 has to be one of the biggest jokes around. There is no way that I will be implementing this for any of my customers for some time yet.

Any manufacturer of any active device that only has USB 3 (laptops, my new laptop, Intel NUCs etc) available should be taken out and shot for foisting such an unreliable, ill thought out concept on the public. Maybe we should have gone for something like USB 2.3 rather than 3.

If USB 3.1 is now out then we need to wait until USB 6 is introduced before USB 3 will work reliably !

I cannot believe that they can make something as complicated as a motherboard with its thousands of circuits and encompassing dozens of standards and yet can't sort something as simple as USB 3.

20 years ago I could never get over the fact that a $20,000 deal could be stopped for the want of a $10 cable solution. Okay now the deals aren't $20k but the issue of the $10 cable is still here.

Thanks to everyone for the very useful information.

I just bought a Macbook Pro Retina (late 2013) and upgraded my USB hub to a 3.0 version from Plugable (the 10-port model). The first time I tried to perform a Time Machine backup to my external drive (Other World Computing Mercury Elite Pro) using USB 3.0, the drive was repeatedly ejected during the backup process. Plugging the drive directly into the Macbook worked fine with no random ejections.

I contacted Plugable and they immediately sent me a replacement hub with the newest firmware. Assuming that this would solve the problem, I swapped the replacement for my existing hub, connected the external drive, and began a time machine backup. Within minutes, the external drive ejected itself. This happened several times. Then the drive became unreadable. Then I ran disk utility and found that the time machine volume was corrupted and cannot be repaired. Disk utility advised me to move all files off the drive and reformat it. Luckily, I have multiple backups, but this result is disastrous.

I contacted Plugable support, explained the situation, and got back the following note:

"I hope that a different hub will yield better results but I do caution, most USB 3.0 hubs on the market today share the same internal designs as our using the VIA VL81x series chipset. It's very possible a replacement even by a different brand may behave similarly. It also may work perfectly, I honestly cannot say. We've had reports from customers mentioning their external hard drive occasionally gets dropped off the USB bus on their Mac computers, but never to this extent of massive corruption. On the flip-side, Windows users never seem to report drives being dropped. I'm not sure what this tells us other than we may need to communicate back to VIA that more testing on the Mac platform is required."

I am really shocked at this terrible compatibility between USB 3.0 hubs and Macs. I've used Macs for decades and assumed that any such incompatibility would be, at the very least, more widely publicized. It ***** to plug your drive into a hub and have the volume corrupted without any real warning.

If anyone finds a usb 3.0 hub that doesn't use the VIA VL81X chipset, please let folks know whether it has the same compatibility issues.

Goodbye WiFi and wireless devices if you try to use USB3 -- Intel's OWN report here --

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/io/universal-serial-bus/usb3-frequency-in terference-paper.html

I have a USB3 hub and cables that I have wrapped in copper foil. This does help but you need to keep other cables away from the hub.

Also, if I am going to do an important disk backup, I often plug the copper-wrapped cable directly into the iMac

late 2012 iMac 27", 16 GB RAM, 1 TB Fusion drive, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 675MX 1024 MB

I had the same problems but with a USB 2.0 7 port hub. I got my Mac Mini last month so I didn't have any 3.0 drive enclosures yet. I have four enclosures that are all USB 2.0.

I connected my hub to the Mini and then connected all my derives. When I would try and copy anything to any of those drives, the drive would eject. I finally gave up using the hub for about a week and tried it again. This time, the problem seemed to go away and I have been able to use any of the drives as my drive for iTunes as well as a Time Machine drive.

I did have the same problem as the drive ejecting and then becoming unreadable. I managed to recover all the files but they were damaged and broken into several pieces, these were all blu-ray rips of movies. I had to trash everything and reformat the drive and it's been working until yesterday. That same drive started to eject when copying large files to it again.

Also, the drives would not sleep when sleeping the computer. Seems these are all common problem between 2.0 and 3.0 hubs.

I tried an Anker hub, but it wasn't able to keep multiple USB3 HDDs spinning reliably. I went for the (admittedly uglier) Plugable hub and have had at least 4 drives running on it - a mix of bus-powered and AC-powered - with no problems: http://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B008ZGKWQI/ref=oh_details_o02_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&ps c=1

WHAT? How does this help? If I'm 5000 miles away, and need to reboot my Mini, how the **** am I supposed to power-cycle, un/plug devices?? This is BROKEN, and Apple needs to fix it, or refund our money, so we can buy unix boxes that "JUST WORK". :-P

I solved this problem by using a Tek Republic TUH-300. The chipset in it is a Genesys Logic GL-3522.