Considering the vast amount of USB peripherals available and the seemingly limited number of USB ports on today's notebooks and budget desktop systems, a USB hub seems to be the perfect solution for those who are port challenged. With that in mind, Rosewill is offering an inexpensive and compact solution for those needing to expand their port capabilities without breaking the bank. How well can a cheap USB hub perform compared to a built-in motherboard port, and are there any other concerns? That's what we'll find out today.

The Design

The RHUB-310 Hub is rather unique in its design. Featuring a mirrored faceplate embossed with the manufacturer's name and port numbers, the unit measures just 94.5mm x 45.5mm x 15.5mm without the removable stand. The stand itself is rather heavy and ensures the unit stays in the vertical position with most cable configurations. We did find that removing the stand and laying the unit flat was the best way to go with all seven ports populated. However, there are not any rubber feet to keep the unit from sliding around on the desk in this configuration.

The unit features four USB 2.0 capable downstream ports on the front side and three on the rear section of the unit. The rear section also features the upstream port with a mini B-type cable connection and a DC adapter plug. The top of the unit features a power-on LED, but the port numbers on the faceplate do not light up. Rosewill offers the unit in white, red, and black at this time. The plastic is high quality and defies the $24.99 price tag.

Rosewill includes a short manual, mini B-type cable, and power adapter with the kit. Really, the only design issue we could find here is the mirrored faceplate that attracts and keeps fingerprints - something that may be useful for a CSI team, but we found it annoying as keeping it clean became a priority with us. [Ed: So what if Gary's a bit OCD?]

Let's take a quick look at the performance of this budget wonder hub.

The Setup

Nothing new here as we utilize our standard uATX test setup featuring the Gigabyte MA78GM-S2H 780G board that has become a standard fixture in the labs now. We will utilize our Maxtor One-Touch II External drive unit for our file copy tests.

The Specs

The Rosewill RHUB-310 series features seven USB 2.0 ports and is capable of bus-powered or DC adapter operation. When operating in bus-powered mode, the unit draws all of its power from the host computer's USB interface. USB current (power) specifications are allocated in units up to 100mA with a maximum available of 500mA per port in a compliant design. As such, a bus-powered design is limited to at best four downstream ports since it cannot provide more than four connections of 100mA to downstream devices. Rosewill provides a 2A power supply for the unit that will fall short of the maximum 3.5A draw if all seven ports are populated with devices that require the maximum 500mA per port.

Performance

We ran several tests to determine any potential performance penalties with the RHUB-310 when compared to the USB connection on the Gigabyte 780G. Due to the power requirements for our I-Pod and HP printer, the bus-powered setup is not capable of fully supporting the peripherals in these tests. The unit did work properly with four low power devices (mice, standard keyboard, thumb drives) connected.

In our Load Tests, we connect a variety of peripherals ranging from a Logitech G15 keyboard to a Sony A350 camera in order to populate all seven ports with a variety of devices commonly used to track any performance differences. Our bus-powered configuration will only handle four low power devices so we were unable to complete the full load data transfer tests.

Based on the results, using the Rosewill RHUB-310 Hub did not adversely affect performance in either the bus-powered or powered adapter mode in our single peripheral tests. In our full load tests, we noticed a slight slowdown of about 7% with six other devices connected. This is actually an excellent result considering the hub has to maintain communication between seven devices including game devices that use an interrupt protocol.

Quick Thoughts

With street prices around $24.99, very good ergonomics, excellent compatibility, and almost flawless performance, we cannot help but recommend the Rosewill RHUB-310 7-port USB 2.0 Hub. Of course, we base our recommendation on the user having the right mix of low or high power devices to match the capability of this hub. We put the unit through several days of harsh testing and used numerous peripherals without a problem. Our recommendation is to run the unit with the power adapter to ensure proper power support across most devices. We did not care for the mirrored faceplate design and the cable lengths could have been about six inches longer, but otherwise Rosewill has delivered a solid unit for the money.