I need a better hub for my powered external hard drives. I recently purchased a Sabrent Sabrent 4-Port USB 3.0 Hub with Individual LED Lit Power Switches, Included 5V/2.5A Power Adapter (HB-UMP3) from Amazon, but I not sure if it was defective or just wasn’t made to handle my drives. The drives kept disconnecting randomly, so I sending it back.
Does anyone here have any experience with the OSMC hub?
I want to be able to hook up all my drives to the Vero and then be able to disconnect the hub from the Vero and connect it to my Windows 10 PC to add, remove or organize files between the drives.
My questions for the OSMC hub are:
!. When the hub is attached to the PC can files be transferred between the drives (some hubs have trouble with this)?
Since each drive has it’s own power, does the hub have to be powered?
Do the drives have to be “Safely removed” from the Vero, before turning off the hub switches?
Does the hub transfer files at the 3.0 rate (speed) when attached to the PC?
A USB hub is just routing information. All of this information must go through the controller in the computer so whenever you transfer from one drive to another attached to the same hub they will get bottlenecked as only one device can talking to the controller at any given moment. This limitation (only a single channel to the USB controller) is also found on some PC’s as well.
No, you have a single cable going to the computer so you’re stuck with that single connection speed. The built in USB ports on some computers have independent connections to the controller so they can overcome this. There may be some kind of a docking station with it’s own dedicated controller that may be able to do better but you are getting into serious money territory and i’m not familiar enough with them to say.
Thanks for the info. So I’ll use the hub to connect my drives to the Vero, but attached drives to individual ports on the PC to transfer files between them.
A lot of cheap hubs disconnect if you try to push too much data through them. Basically, the channels to each drive are just fine, but the “hub” part can’t handle more than one individual channel. In most cases, this just limits speed, but cheaper hubs roll over and die.
That’s what happened. I had the hub hooked up to the PC and trying to transfer files between 2 drives. It dropped the connection during the transfer. Also I had all 3 drives just sitting idle and the hub still dropped all 3 randomly.
Why, exactly? Moving files through samba is going to be slow, surely? The trouble only comes when Kodi has to re-organise its library after you have re-organised your files.
Since I move a lot of Blu-ray and 4k files as big as 80gb, what system set up would be best for moving large files? I have a Windows 10 PC and haven’t a clue about networking, Samba, SSH, NAS, etc. I need to buy a “Networking for Dummies” book or take a class. I’ve been reading some posts and other articles, but everything is overwhelming to someone who has no clue.
The general broad strokes of this kind of networking are fairly straightforward most of the time. The details of what you need to do can be sussed out when you decide what you want to do. Without purchasing anything new you could install the samba server from the OSMC store and from your PC you can open an explorer window and in the address bar type \\(ip of your vero) and hit enter. Hopefully it will ask you for credentials (osmc/osmc) and then your looking at your hard drive plugged into your vero and you can treat it like any other folder in windows. Compared to plugging it into a PC with USB 3 it is going to be slow to transfer but that may not make a bit of difference. If you can just drag a file over and walk away it may take you a half hour to transfer vs. five minutes, but if you only spent 20 seconds vs 5 min actually touching anything… perspective.
In the picture you posted, the green bar with the word “network” in it, that is the address bar. Click in that and replace the text that is there with \\192.168.0.200 and hit enter.
