Explosive USB Hub

This blog entry could get slightly technical but only slightly. I'm going to be writing about USB devices and USB ports. USB, which stands for Universal Serial Bus, was chosen as a standard in the PC world in 1995 to allow PC's peripherals to be more "plug and play" a characteristic of Mac computers which was then outshining PC's. The idea was that every peripheral (disk drive, printer, scanner, etc.) would have a common plug going to the computer. There would be sufficient information inside the peripheral so that when it is attached to a computer, that computer can figure out what was just attached and, if necessary, ask the human for appropriate sotware.

In 1995 there weren't many devices with USB cables. Not in 1996, 1997, or even 1998. But by 2000 it was difficult to find peripheral devices with any other kind. Suddenly, computers that had 2 or 3outlets, or ports, were swamped with 5 or 6 peripherals all with USB plugs. The result was a rush on hubs which could make 1 outlet service 4 peripherals. Although our computer has 6 USB ports, we had 3 4-outlet hubs so that instead of 6 devices, our computer can connect to 15 devices and we have need for 11.

Complication: engineers quickly found a way to make cost effective USB ports that ran at 40 times the speed of the original USB ports. Computer manufacturers adopted the new design rapidly but USB hub manufacturers, especially those of cheap, foreign-made ones did not. Two of our hubs were low rate hubs which meant that half our devices could only run at the slower rate. For keyboard, mice, and sound equipment, the slow rate was acceptable but it wasn't acceptable for mass storage or data transfer devices. Every time I would plug in my Apple iPod into a low speed port to synchronize it, the computer warned me that a faster port was available.

A new 3.0 standard will be out later this year but until I buy a new computer, it won't make any sense to upgrade our hubs.

Now, to the real story...

I wanted to upgrade our two 1.0 hubs to 2.0 so it wouldn't matter which hub I used. We found some relatively cheap ones at Fry's and I finally found time to swap the others out. While I was at it, I tried cleaning up a little all the cables that seem to grow like weeds under the computer desk. Then I started putting things back together. I had the computer power off but the two new hubs were live. They light up as bright as Christmas trees giving me a lot more light under the desk. Everything went so good in the first hub that I decided to go to the second hub before turning the computer back on. I went to plug in the first USB device for the second hub when Kawoosh! That was the sound I heard as the air pressure under the desk suddenly increased then dropped. I think I knocked about five years off my life expectancy. I was sure I had blown the computer or the peripheral device. But it appeared I hadn't even blown a fuse. That second hub was wasted and its power supply was running really hot.

I decided it was time to see what damage might have been done by all my fiddling around especially my moving all the equipment to new hubs. The computer came on but stopped with an error stating: "your hard drive is "dirty'. A program called CHKDSK was then activated to see that the data hadn't been corrupted. It had to run a three pass check of my files and indices. And my mouse wouldn't work because I had changed ports. I couldn't control anything. I sat back and waited for the world to crash around me.

But it didn't!!!! After checking the disk and other potential security problems and finding no problems, the computer continued to boot up and then look for all the peripherals. As it found the keyboard, and my mouse I felt more in control. As it continued to recognize and enumerate our USB devices, I could finally breathe out. Switching hubs had been more exciting than I had imagined it would be.