Raspberry Pi Announces $12 USB 3 Hub

[GFreeman]

Most Raspberry Pi single-board computers, with the exception of the Raspberry Pi Zero and A+ form factors, incorporate an on-board USB hub to fan out a single USB connection from the core silicon, and provide multiple downstream USB Type-A ports. But no matter how many ports we provide, sometimes you just need more peripherals than we have ports. And with that in mind, today we're launching the official Raspberry Pi USB 3 Hub, a high-quality four-way USB 3.0 hub for use with your Raspberry Pi or other, lesser, computer.

Key features include:

• A single upstream USB 3.0 Type-A connector on an 8 cm captive cable
• Four downstream USB 3.0 Type-A ports
• Aggregate data transfer speeds up to 5 Gbps
• USB-C socket for optional external 3 A power supply (sold separately)

Race you to the bottom
Why design our own hub? Well, we'd become frustrated with the quality and price of the hubs available online. Either you pay a lot of money for a nicely designed and reliable product, which works well with a broad range of hosts and peripherals; or you cheap out and get something much less compatible, or unreliable, or ugly, or all three. Sometimes you spend a lot of money and still get a lousy product.

It felt like we were trapped in a race to the bottom, where bad quality drives out good, and marketplaces like Amazon end up dominated by the cheapest thing that can just about answer to the name "hub".

So, we worked with our partners at Infineon to source a great piece of hub silicon, CYUSB3304, set Dominic to work on the electronics and John to work on the industrial design, and applied our manufacturing and distribution capabilities to make it available at the lowest possible price. The resulting product works perfectly with all models of Raspberry Pi computer, and it bears our logo because we're proud of it: we believe it's the best USB 3.0 hub on the market today.

Grab one and have a play: we think you'll like it.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site | Source

 

[Assimilator]

The brains trust at RPi has really run dry if USB 3 (not even type-C) hubs are the only thing they can come up with. How about releasing a new RPi that isn't a steaming pile of meh?

 

[Frick]

The brains trust at RPi has really run dry if USB 3 (not even type-C) hubs are the only thing they can come up with. How about releasing a new RPi that isn't a steaming pile of meh?

Simple four port USB 3.0 with optional USB-C power, from a known decent company and it's $12? I've been looking at powered USB hubs and they are all either really old, slow, not what I need (just USB ports, no card readers or video or 100W charging) or too exepnsive. The only downside with this is cable lenght.

 

[Assimilator]

Simple four port USB 3.0 with optional USB-C power, from a known decent company and it's $12? I've been looking at powered USB hubs and they are all either really old, slow, not what I need (just USB ports, no card readers or video or 100W charging) or too exepnsive. The only downside with this is cable lenght.

Hubs like this are a dime a dozen and have been for years, e.g. I purchased two of these back in April 2022 and they work just fine despite having a VLI chipset. Really there is no difference between USB3 hub chipsets, the tech has been around so long at this point that it's a solved problem, either it works or it doesn't, the scaremongering that RPi are using to try to convince people that the Infineon chipset is somehow superior is just that - FUD.

Now, if this RPi hub was actually being sold at 12 USD = 9.30 GBP then it might have a chance against the Orico one I listed that's £10.75... except the actual sellers have the RPi model at £11.30 which is more expensive. Derp.

In short there is literally zero reason to buy the RPi hub over the Orico one, unless you are a gullible idiot who thinks that anything that RPi shits out is gold, or are one of those bigots who think a semiconductor designed in Asia is inherently inferior to one from Germany, or absolutely need something in white. The fact that RPi is spending time and effort on building a product that literally nobody asked for, as opposed to spending that time and effort on updating the dated IO of their flagship product, is the hallmark of an organisation that has long since lost its way.

 

[TheLostSwede]

The CYUSB3304 is US$2.65 in quantities of 2k, which makes it quite an expensive USB 3.0 hub IC, which explains why this is $12.

@Assimilator there's one advantage of this, it has a known USB hub IC and this is an "LTS" product that the RPi foundation promises will be available until at least 2030, so if you need something for a long period of time which stays the same, it could be for you. But yeah, for most consumers, it shouldn't matter, as even Genesys Logic doesn't make utter crap USB 3.0 stuff, unlike their USB 2.0 hubs... I guess it's possible there is some really bad USB 3.0 hub IC out there, but I'm not aware of one.

 

[persondb]

Simple four port USB 3.0 with optional USB-C power, from a known decent company and it's $12? I've been looking at powered USB hubs and they are all either really old, slow, not what I need (just USB ports, no card readers or video or 100W charging) or too exepnsive. The only downside with this is cable lenght.

Those are dime a dozen though and about the same price or cheaper-ish. There is also no problem if you get one with card reader or video and just don't use those ports.

Raspberry Pi is just fearmongering. This is already a saturated market.

 

[Frick]

Hubs like this are a dime a dozen and have been for years, e.g. I purchased two of these back in April 2022 and they work just fine despite having a VLI chipset. Really there is no difference between USB3 hub chipsets, the tech has been around so long at this point that it's a solved problem, either it works or it doesn't, the scaremongering that RPi are using to try to convince people that the Infineon chipset is somehow superior is just that - FUD.

Now, if this RPi hub was actually being sold at 12 USD = 9.30 GBP then it might have a chance against the Orico one I listed that's £10.75... except the actual sellers have the RPi model at £11.30 which is more expensive. Derp.

In short there is literally zero reason to buy the RPi hub over the Orico one, unless you are a gullible idiot who thinks that anything that RPi shits out is gold, or are one of those bigots who think a semiconductor designed in Asia is inherently inferior to one from Germany, or absolutely need something in white. The fact that RPi is spending time and effort on building a product that literally nobody asked for, as opposed to spending that time and effort on updating the dated IO of their flagship product, is the hallmark of an organisation that has long since lost its way.

The problem is finding the damned things. Thanks for the tip, Amazon is impossible to browse or search and my usual shops specifically don't have anything similar to those.

As for fearmongering, do note they mention USB hubs in general, and there are still tons of really shitty USB 2.0 hubs out there. Having like an inhouse branded USB hub isn't a bad idea, and as the lostswede says, it's like an LTS version, so there are points to it.

Those are dime a dozen though and about the same price or cheaper-ish. There is also no problem if you get one with card reader or video and just don't use those ports.

Raspberry Pi is just fearmongering. This is already a saturated market.

The problem is most of those usually comes with just two USB ports, or they have three or maybe for but are €50+. If I have to trawl Amazon to find them I would not consider the market to be saturated. In fact the Orico Assimilator posted is the only one like it I've seen.

 

[TheLostSwede]

The problem is finding the damned things. Thanks for the tip, Amazon is impossible to browse or search and my usual shops specifically don't have anything similar to those.

Not impossible, but the Swedish version of Amazon is extra bad, partially due to machine translation and partially because a lot of known brand names aren't sold through Amazon Sweden, so you end up with a bunch of random crap from xina instead.
Try switching to English, I've found it works a lot better for tech stuff.

I did manage to find this one from Ugreen with a GL3510 hub. for less than 60 sek / $6, which is powered.

https://www.amazon.se/-/en/UGREEN-MacBook-ChromeBook-Surface-Lenovo/dp/B08KXNDTPV/