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

My Mac Mini's four USB 3.0 ports work fine with my four USB Seagate GoFlex 3.0 hard drives. The drives mount at startup, and perform at expected USB 3.0 speeds. But, when I connect the drives to a USB 3.0 HUB to free up the Mac's USB ports for other devices, typically two of the USB Seagate drives will mount at startup, but two won't. There's a fix for this: after startup, I simply disconnect AC power from the drives that didn't mount, and reconnect the power a few seconds later. Now all my drives are mounted, they perform properly, and other USB devices connected to other Mac Mini USB ports (a mouse, a USB midi interface) work just fine as well. It's annoying, though, to have to perform this extra disconnect-reconnect step every time. I've tried two different USB 3.0 HUBs -- one from Uspeed and one from Satechi -- and I have exactly the same problem with both. Question: Is anybody else experiencing the same thing with a late 2012 Mac Mini and a USB 3.0 Hub? Has anybody found a 3.0 Hub that doesn't have this issue with the Mac Mini?

Mac mini (Late 2012), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)

Posted on Dec 6, 2012 8:45 AM

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

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  • by AWMarine,

    AWMarine AWMarine May 5, 2014 10:31 PM in response to webalias rex
    Level 1 (5 points)
    May 5, 2014 10:31 PM in response to webalias rex

    In reply to the previous posting:

     

    I'd be interested in Orico's response to your question regarding the firmware version. Thanks for including the link as it helps ensure we're referring to the same hub. I like the looks and features. It's attractive, uses a Type-B connector, instead of the less reliable Micro-B connector, and has a switch.

     

    I'm skeptical about their failure to specifically state the firmware version, especially since it's such a critical factor for reliability on a Mac. They say "newest", but not that the chipset is Revision B2 or the Firmware is 90.8x (mine is 90.81). I personally know of cases where the vendor stated they sold only the "newest" version, then shipped Firmware Version 85.81. It doesn't work — I have one (now plugged into the 90.81 hub and it works. The price also seems a bit high for a 4-Port hub (after I converted to US$.)

     

    BTW, Orico states that the hub first came out in April 2013. However, It's my understanding that the 90.8x firmware wasn't available until September 2013, which is when mine was received.

     

    The hub at the below link offers more features and at a lower cost (which could reflect differences in power adapters.) The additional charging port (2.1 A, or 2,100 ma) would be nice for charging an iPad/tablet. (The Orico refers to charging, but then cautions against it. I've not done comparisons on other 4-Port hubs. Don't forget that USB 3.0 ports are limited to only 900 ma.)

     

    http://amzn.to/1j5EowT

     

    Less obvious on the Plugable hub as an advantage, at least IMO, is the cables coming off the top. I use quality 12" cables to cut down the clutter. The cables go up, then back and down to the drives behind directly behind the hub. They don't go across the desk. Not having the 0.5 and 1 meter cables running across the desktop reduces the footprint and clutter substantially. Although I have a very long desk, it's also very loaded so any gain is appreciated.

    ~

  • by William Donelson,

    William Donelson William Donelson May 7, 2014 12:23 AM in response to AWMarine
    Level 4 (2,520 points)
    Mac OS X
    May 7, 2014 12:23 AM in response to AWMarine

    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.

  • by alwaysdis,

    alwaysdis alwaysdis Jul 5, 2014 11:22 PM in response to William Donelson
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jul 5, 2014 11:22 PM in response to William Donelson

    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.

  • by William Donelson,

    William Donelson William Donelson Jul 5, 2014 11:28 PM in response to alwaysdis
    Level 4 (2,520 points)
    Mac OS X
    Jul 5, 2014 11:28 PM in response to alwaysdis

    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.

  • by alwaysdis,

    alwaysdis alwaysdis Jul 6, 2014 2:13 AM in response to William Donelson
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jul 6, 2014 2:13 AM in response to William Donelson

    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.

  • by mattfreedman,

    mattfreedman mattfreedman Oct 13, 2014 6:42 PM in response to webalias rex
    Level 1 (15 points)
    Oct 13, 2014 6:42 PM in response to webalias rex

    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.

  • by William Donelson,

    William Donelson William Donelson Oct 13, 2014 9:59 PM in response to mattfreedman
    Level 4 (2,520 points)
    Mac OS X
    Oct 13, 2014 9:59 PM in response to mattfreedman

    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

  • by TooDarkPark,

    TooDarkPark TooDarkPark Oct 13, 2014 10:49 PM in response to mattfreedman
    Level 4 (1,590 points)
    Oct 13, 2014 10:49 PM in response to mattfreedman

    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.

  • by Aylwin,

    Aylwin Aylwin Oct 14, 2014 1:03 PM in response to webalias rex
    Level 1 (10 points)
    Oct 14, 2014 1:03 PM in response to webalias rex

    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

  • by ckeilah,

    ckeilah ckeilah Jul 15, 2015 4:57 AM in response to buffett0462
    Level 1 (12 points)
    Mac OS X
    Jul 15, 2015 4:57 AM in response to buffett0462

    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

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