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I have a question about how USB 3 hubs work when you connect USB 2 devices to them. The answer to this question may vary from hub to hub, or it may be standard across the board.
The question is, if I filled a USB 3 hub with USB 2 devices, would the computer still be able to talk to the USB devices at USB 3 speeds? Or would it essentially step-down the whole hub to USB 2?
A better way to ask the question might be with examples. Let's say I have a 10-port USB 3 hub, connected to a Mac with a native, dedicated USB 3 port. Now let's say I connect 10 independent USB 2 hard drives to the hub. And lets also pretend that each hard drive is hard limited to 25MB/sec read and write speed...
Now of course, the computer could only ever talk to any ONE drive at 25MB/sec. BUT if I were to copy one file from each drive, all at the same time, to an SSD internal to the computer (where there would be no read/write bottlenecks), would I still somehow get stuck at 25MB/sec, or would the speeds get "merged" and would the computer be able to read from the hub at a total of 250MB/sec? (this isn't a raid question, assume these are all just regular old individual drives. And assume they are large files, and I'm quick with the mouse, so I was able to drag and drop all 10 virtually instantly).
The question is, if I filled a USB 3 hub with USB 2 devices, would the computer still be able to talk to the USB devices at USB 3 speeds? Or would it essentially step-down the whole hub to USB 2?
A better way to ask the question might be with examples. Let's say I have a 10-port USB 3 hub, connected to a Mac with a native, dedicated USB 3 port. Now let's say I connect 10 independent USB 2 hard drives to the hub. And lets also pretend that each hard drive is hard limited to 25MB/sec read and write speed...
Now of course, the computer could only ever talk to any ONE drive at 25MB/sec. BUT if I were to copy one file from each drive, all at the same time, to an SSD internal to the computer (where there would be no read/write bottlenecks), would I still somehow get stuck at 25MB/sec, or would the speeds get "merged" and would the computer be able to read from the hub at a total of 250MB/sec? (this isn't a raid question, assume these are all just regular old individual drives. And assume they are large files, and I'm quick with the mouse, so I was able to drag and drop all 10 virtually instantly).