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Day: November 3, 2009

Cascaded USB Hubs

As part of rewiring my office I purchased this seven-port USB hub from Firefold for $22.99, part number USB-7P-HUBSP. It turns out that this hub is actually two Genesys Logic GL852G hub chips, with one cascaded off of the other. The three ports shown above on the left are connected to the first hub, then the other four are connected to the second hub chip. Thus when the case is closed up (as seen here) ports 1-4 are on one hub which is connected to the hub that ports 5-7 are on. This shouldn’t cause a problem, but it’s a much cheaper design than using a seven port hub chip and having everything at the same level.

The hub also ships with a 5V 2.5A switching power supply. Having seven ports which can supply a maximum of 500mA each, this power supply cannot fully power the hub. That said, most devices never pull anywhere near 500mA, so this shouldn’t be a problem either.

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