Bitcoin Forum

In preparation for ASICs, what USB hubs do you have/are going to buy?

I am currently leaning towards http://www.manhattan-products.com/en-US/products/9583-mondohub

The ports are only 500mA, but I am assuming BFL Jalapenos will have something like dual usb inputs.

Wow 28 ports!! someone has a lot of pre-orders!  ;D
I will just be getting a 10 port powered USB hub

I think you might run into logistical issues of keeping all the units & power cords that close together even if you have 28 units.

I bought a $7 cheap 10 port powered USB and I'm regretting it.  It stops working and loses connection about 1-3 hours after starting...

So I'm looking to spend more like $30 for a decent one.

The problem with USB hubs is there aren't any "good" ones.  There are only okay ones.  Newegg has 254 of them and none have significant numbers of high ratings.  If you want one that probably won't fail too soon, I'd go with basically anything without horrific ratings from:

Inland
Bytec
SIIG
Koutech
Belkin
Hawking
US Robotics
Kensington
TrendNet
Sabrent

A lot of those companies make some pretty bad ones but they also carry a couple that are pretty nice.
Ultra "makes" really bad products but their hubs I've had a lot of luck with too. (they don't make anything, they buy OEM and put their name on it).

if I had to buy one right this second, I'd say none of the above and get this beast:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4621333&CatId=392
not a bad price either

You need to determine if redundancy is important, 1 large hub = single point of failure,  Multiple smaller hubs will spread out the risk and allow some margin of safety.  One fails and you can plug into the others. Also make the determination if you will need USB 3.0 ports before buying.

Instead of buying a ton of Jalapenos, why not buy Singles?  They presumably won't get their power from the USB anyway, so pretty much any hub should work.  You may also want to check out which hubs people are using for Raspberry Pi devices.  The Raspberry Pi is extremely picky when it comes to USB, so anything that works with it is pretty well designed.  You'd want to go with the ones with the highest power ratings: http://elinux.org/RPi_VerifiedPeripherals#Working_USB_Hubs

I use this one, but it sounds like you want more ports.  It's got a pretty good port:power ratio though (2.6 Amps and only 4 ports).  It should be good to power two Jalapenos: http://www.amazon.com/Belkin-Ultra-Slim-Series-4-Port-F4U040v/dp/B005A0B3FG/

Assuming the Jalapeno power requirements are accurate and it operates on 5v, you'll need the following formula for amp output in any USB hub:  .9 * (number of Jalapenos) = Amperage output of USB hub.  That Mondohub linked to in the OP outputs 4A (or 20 watts), so you'd only be able to run 4 Jalapenos on it, wasting 16 ports.  That also assumes the Jalapeno powers itself with two USB plugs.

Wow I did not know this, I am an idiot when it comes to electrical stuff. I just plug it in and hope I don't start a fire. I did one of my single trade-ins for 8 Jalapenos just for the hell of it, so I will need a lot of usb ports for those plus the SCs and bASICs I ordered.

Yeah, given the prices, you'd be better off getting 4 of the Belkin USB hubs I linked to and using those.  They're $20 each and power 2 Jalapenos vs $60 each for 4 Jalapenos.  I hope you've got 4 open USB ports on your computer (or multiple computers) :)

I asked this in this thread :

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=114428.0

And at BFL forum I posted some findings:

Heres a site with a great deal,never bought from them before,so use at your own risk.I will

13 port,5 volt-4 amp $35

http://www.synchrotech.com/product-u...b_13-port.html
 
Another 4 amp w/4 ports model $42.99
 
http://www.synchrotech.com/product-u...d-4-HU430.html
 
Each Jalapeno is 900ma,so 4 Jallies per hub,with 300ma left over.
 
But.....the ports I think only support 500ma each,so you'll need the dual USB cable too for each Jally

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16812270226
 
https://forums.butterflylabs.com/showthread.php/13-Lots-of-Jalapenos-on-one-PC

I'm still unsure,is USB 2.0 500ma & USB 3.0 1000ma?? Or do some 2.0 handle 1000ma??

No standard USB 2 port coming from a computer supports 1A.  There may be special ports or features on some motherboards that support 1A for quickly charging devices, but I wouldn't count on it.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817182208

Good find  8)

Heres the full specs:

Model No.:RHB-500

Color:Black

Type:USB

Standards:USB 2.0/1.1

Ports :1 x Upstream, 10 x Downstream

Transfer Rate :1.5/12/480Mbps

Power Input :Self-power mode / BUS-power mode

Power adapter: DC 5V 4A

Hub Dimension:155 x 69 x 28 mm / 6.1" x 2.7" x 1.1" (not including power adapter)

Weight:Unit Weight (not including adapter): 145g / 0.32 Lbs
Power Adapter: 195g / 0.43 Lbs

Warranty:1 Year


http://www.rosewill.com/products/1543/ProductDetail_Specifications.htm

A lot of newer boards come with high powered usb devices that are designed to support charging from a USB port and these should be sufficient for running the Jallies. In addition a lot of board manufacturers such as gigabbyte, msi, etc also have released  software for high charging. The only exception I see is if you intend to run a large amount of the Jallies on a single machine, but if that was the case then getting a single would probably be a better idea

Cheers

I bought Exsys 1177, the Usb Hub has 7 Ports and a 4A Power Supply.
I will install the Hub inside a 4HE 19", and the Hub has Support for power Supply by floppy connector, so no Adapter is neccessaryto use the ATX power Supply.

+1 and also most pairs of USB ports right next to each other on the front of the case or inline USB ports on the motherboard itself share an electrical circuit so they're 0.5A total between them, each being able to pull the entire 0.5 though.  So if Jalapenos need 1A via USB, A LOT of people are going to find that their system won't run them.

Would something powered by a molex connector work to power 4 jalapenos? Like this?
http://www.ebay.com/itm/EEEKit-for-PC-4Port-USB-3-0-HUB-to-PCI-e-PCI-Superspeed-Card-Adapter-NEC-Chipset-/170859690702?pt=US_Internal_Port_Expansion_Cards&hash=item27c807face

I emailed Gigabyte about my mobo:
 
Do the USB ports (either 2.0 or 3.0) allow 500 milliamp or 1000 milliamp as a max current draw? If yes, which ones ?
 
My motherboard model: GA-990FXA-UD3(rev. 1.0)
 
I'll be using them for several Bitcoin mining devices consuming 4.5 watts (900 milliamp each).
 

From Gigabyte:
 
Dear Customer,
 
All are the same and they can accept up to 1A
 *Whether to support 3X USB power design, it may vary by models*
 We are unable to verify your device as only iphone, ipad been verified for charging.
 
WooHoo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I still may get the dual USB cables,just to be sure I don't fry my mobo.

btw almost any Asus or MSI motherboard made recently has a phone charging smart 3x power feature and every one I've ever seen recently supports 1 amp power.  I guarantee no laptop on the planet under $800 does though.

well the small asics like the bfl jalepeno are usb powered

the bfl single sc and the bASIC have there own barrel connector for power

Just buy one of these and rewire a 12 port hub.
http://www.ebay.ca/itm/12A-5V-60W-Switching-DC-AC-Switch-Power-Supply-Driver-LED-Strip-CCTV-/260983585712?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3cc3d57bb0

Alternately, if you have a newer PSU that uses a DC-DC converter for the lower voltage rails, just use the 5V rail from that. Most PSUs can put out way more 5V power than anyone uses.

I think BFL has already verified many times that that's not true.  It's completely idiotic since USB power fluxuates and is limited and varies from computer to computer.  It's the worst way to run a high end cbhip imagineable and 2.5W could never run a Jalapeno.

well according to  this
http://www.butterflylabs.com/order-form-bitforce-sc-jalapeno/

Product includes: Fully assembled enclosure, USB Cable, & driver software (including BTC block mining application).

it doesnt say anything about a ac adaptor

Thanks for the info. What is the best way to power via a barrel connector? Will each BFL Single/bASIC need a separate AC adapter?

This has worked flawlessly for me
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817392046

btw in case you missed my other post, if you think you don't need a powered USB hub for the Jalapenos, you do.  Standard board USB power isn't good enough for like 4 different reasons.  You could maybe get away with a PCI-E controller to help voltage dips, interference, unknown power limitations, etc but why not just go external?

For the singles, probably not unless you're actually out of them, as I would expect them to draw almost nothing over the USB power since it's 2.5W max and the singles are like 60 or 80W or whatever.

I've got a mondohub - works great. manual buttons are nice (they control if that port gets external power or not) - and having LEDs attached to each port switch is great for identifying if you've got a power delivery problem.

I just bought one of these http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA1DS0CF0426 for $41 with 15% discount
and upgraded my order for 8 jalapenos to a single SC so I won't have to worry about powering all of the jalapenos.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Black-7-Port-USB-2-0-High-Speed-HUB-ON-OFF-Sharing-Switch-For-Laptop-PC-/110954699994?ssPageName=ADME:X:AAQ:US:1123

$5
Free shipping (from China, but I don't need it for a month at least)
Cool blue lights
7 ports.

How can you go wrong?  I got 2.

I have a ten different models of USB hubs for sale on Bitmit. Here are some of them:

https://www.bitmit.net/en/img/trade_uploads/03-11-2012/10-port-usb-2-0-hub-with-_92b09_1_thumb.jpg
https://www.bitmit.net/en/img/trade_uploads/03-8-2012/7-port-usb-2-0-hub-with-o_2ff6f_1_thumb.jpg
https://www.bitmit.net/en/img/trade_uploads/03-11-2012/7-port-usb-2-0-hub-with-i_dce5b_1_thumb.jpg (https://www.bitmit.net/en/q/?q=usb+hub&ref=1836)

You will soon find out why I stopped buying cheap electronics from China. Good luck  ;D

Dont ever use a usb 3 for usb 2 devices. usb 3 still has issues due to cheap chipsets.

I don't understand this attraction to usb, at least not for more than a single unit.  If one intends to accumulate a number of these stand alone hashing devices, there are much better interfaces to use.  Firewire comes to mind immediately.  And before anyone complains about not having firewire on their PC, if you can invest gobs of money into a growing ASIC farm, you can buy a $40 firewire card off Ebay.

USB has it's place, certainly.  But I would think that it wouldn't take very many of these devices to overwelm even a 480 Mb/s serial bus, considering the relatively high overhead penalty that a spider's web of powered hubs is going to introduce into such a plan.

And how do you explain firewires incapability to hub?

I have several of these Belkin hubs,they are powered up to 2.5 amps @ 5 volts.

http://i63.photobucket.com/albums/h148/Bigblock462/F5U101-WB-unit.jpg

Belkin F5U101,4 ports,5 volt @ 2.5 amps.

So in theory I could run at least 2 Jalapeno's on each hub.

But yeah,USB supplying that much power for a device is not a good decision.I would prefer a wallwort myself or get some cables from Cablez  8)

I shouldn't be needing them,I'm going to upgrade my order to a 30gh unit instead.Maybe I'll get a Jalapeno or two later just for the novelty  ;)

What about just to communicate with devices and not for power purposes?

Do people think a decent laptop with a quad CPU can handle like 25 of the 54 or 60 GH units ?

Can you plug in like 2-3 hubs to one laptop ?

Of course

With cgminer yes

Firewire is a daisy chain serial bus, it doesn't need to hub.  The second unit plugs into the second firewire port on the first unit.  Also, firewire uses a much higher power bus voltage, of 16 volts nominal.  It could handle a small asic on it's own without powered hubs.  Furthermore, you can now get firewire switched hubs, so that complaint is moot.

And you don't think daisychained firewire gets "overwhelmed"?

I've gotten LOTS of cheap electronics from China, and I've never had a problem.  It's not that hard to implement USB (all of the USB you're using right now was almost certainly made in China).  I'll be very surprised if these hubs don't work.  If they don't, $10 loss.  No biggie ;).

What did you get that didn't work?

I am curious as well.

On topic:

I like to buy USB hubs that have proved themselves by reading user reviews.

Its cool,but thats not a powered hub,it won't work for the Jalapeno's,only for the SC Singles 30 or 60 gh models.

My biggest complaint was the cctv security camera I bought from China. It took FOREVER to figure out how to work it due to the software not working on Windows 7. Seems like every software of things sold on ebay from China only support windows xp. Then finding drivers for it to work took hours of looking and managed to download 2 viruses along the way (thank god it was in a virtual machine). I guess you should be fine though since USB doesn't require trying to find software haha.

Kind of on topic: I think I'm going to buy a Jalapeno just to mod it to fit in a 5.25 bay for the novelty of it.

If you want to see one that doesn't work and what it did to not work, just hop over to newegg and sort by "best rating" then go to one of the last pages.  You'll find epic equipment like this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817175014&SortField=0&SummaryType=0&PageSize=10&SelectedRating=-1&VideoOnlyMark=False&IsFeedbackTab=true#scrollFullInfo

read some of the reviews for mega lolz.

I once bought a cheap off-brand MP3 player off ebay that was shipped directly from China.  It never worked, and I think it might have simply been a theatre prop.

Sure, it can.  My point is that USB is great for many things; such as thumbdrives, keyboards & mice.  But streaming across a USB bus (particularly across a hub) is a hell of a bottleneck.  Firewire was literally designed for streaming of data.  Again, don't limit yourselves simply to the interfaces that you are used to.  USB would be fine for a single unit, but not for a large number of them.  They will each need their own stream from the host, and the overhead for streaming on USB is huge.  Each unit will be competing with all others for access.  This would also be true for firewire after a point, of course; but overhead for setting up and maintaining a dedicated data stream on firewire is much lower than USB.  USB's greatest advantage is that it's everywhere; and it's everywhere because it was the first market ready hot-pluggable serial bus standard.  USB is VHS, Firewire is BetaMax.

It is a powered hub - says right in the description.  You need to put a 5v power supply into it, and I don't think one is included.  I'm doing SCs and bASICs, so it won't matter.

Ah yeah things like that from china can be a huge pain.  As long as it's a dumb piece of equipment, it's usually somewhat safe, but as soon as drivers are required, good luck.

If my ASICs need more than 480Mbps (even combined) to calculate hashes, I'll be extremely surprised.

I'll try to remember to leave a review on here when these arrive.

Ah,I just looked at the pic & saw no wallwort.So you need to buy it seperately ??? They say 1 amp,so you can run only 1 Jalapeno.Oh well..............

Belkin makes some very solid powered hubs

I can second this.  Belkins are good.

I still have my 10 year old dlink.

I have a D-Link DUB-H7 for 4 or 5 years now I think.  I have never had any problems with it.  The only problem is that it does not contain any USB 3.0 ports.

Do the Jalapenos use the USB port only for power, or do they use it for data connectivity?

According to the USB Charging Specification the max current is negotiated digitally. When non negotiated, the maximum is 500mA for USB2 and 900mA for USB3. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Serial_Bus#Charging_ports_and_accessory_charging_adapters for details.

Of course it uses data, but im pretty sure hubs dont care about negotiated power

Hmm I wonder if you have a PSU molex 5v and ground if you could just wire it directly into the DC barrel on there.  It would definitely supply more than enough power for some jalepenos.

the pcb traces may melt

+1 for D-Links and Belkins. I recommend them without hesitation.

Question:

Imagine you can have a heavy duty 5A 10-port USB hub. Imagine such product exists.
Would you buy it? How much would you spend for it?

Nevermind. I think I already found a viable commercial product, without the need for me to go through the hassle of building one.

http://www.amazon.com/Plugable-Port-Speed-Power-Adapter/dp/B003Z4G3I6

so does anyone know if there's an upper limit to the current a hub can support?  I ask because I'm curious what would stop me from buying a 10 port hub with an external power connection and providing my own 5v 10a power which should be ~ 1a per port

it's doable and would not be hard at all, but I was wondering if anyone had experience putting more than a few amps through a USB hub.

Putting more amps into something then they were designed to handle usually will fry them. I've never tried this with USB hubs, but I have experience frying amps in my car lol.

good point, I also forgot that it's usb 3.0 that has ~900mA per port not 2.0

I believe that would work.

That looks like the Rosewill rebranded (or vice versa)

If a powered USB hub is not necessary, is it of any advantage (in terms of reliability, etc). I n other words, assuming, as has been widely reported, that ASICs are powered via barrel connectors, would it be any advantage, still to connect them through powered USB hubs, or would this be needlessly redundant?

For a Single or other device that gets its power elsewhere (and presumably doesn't need any significant power going over USB), there should be no need or advantage to buying a powered hub.  However, it would definitely be an absolute necessity for Jalapenos.

an unpowered hub would not run 1 Jalapeno in almost all cases.  The voltage loss, limitations, and the fact that most single USB ports can't get to 4.5W, it's not going to work for most people.

How about using USB power injectors so you can be sure all Jalapenos get full power they need and you don't need to worry about taxing your USB hub; something like this:

http://www.balticnetworks.com/5v-power-injector-for-usb.html

And power all the power injectors with a desktop power supply.

The only need for a powered USB hub is for the Jalapeno's.All other ASIC's don't need it,a standard hub will do  ;)

because the wires inside it will melt

Assuming you know what you're doing to provide power from the power supply; the main point is you can use power injectors.

I almost bought that hub when it was on sale for $25.

MondoHub looks perfect.

http://www.manhattan-products.com/en-US/products/9583-mondohub

http://www.manhattan-products.com/en-US/products/9583-mondohub/images/31291.jpg

Fill that puppy up with ASICs.

Thanks for posting that! It really got my attention, now to play the game: if the price is right ;).

guys, it's only 4 amps = 8 ports at full 500mA USB2 specs.

The details show:

• Up to 500 mA power, all ports
• Input: 100 - 240 V, 50/60 Hz; 1.6A, maximum

So I think it will be fine.

Well that answers one question... if you actually worked for comcast you wouldn't like either of those manufacturers.

That's true ;)...

The manufacturers fucked up bad.
They should have made the connection ethernet or firewire
Most Ethernet chips can support upto 64 simultaneous connections, USB can only handle ONE connection at a time, no matter how many devices are connected. (you could even STREAM the requirements out of the ethernet/firewire controller into the slaves using a single connection)
So once you start slapping on those GH/s units, the USB chain is going to be spending more time in negotiation/connection/disconnection
that it is just not funny.

The only real solution is to DUMP the hubs and load the computer up with USB cards, then at-least you can aim for 1:1 rather than some fucked up binary tree dangling off a single USB host.

HC

No it won't. Re-read the specs. Power adapter part.

Guys you are just talking past each other.  Whether or not it can support full USB specs or not, 500mAmps per port is still only 4 amps for the entire hub.  I doubt 4 amps is enough to support 8 asic miners working full tilt, even if the power adapter was capable of putting out more than 1.6 amps.

Related to quality and durability, by my own experience, US Robotics and Kensington seems to manufacture quality.. I've had those brand for different peripheral/components, those have never failed.. except for a USRobotic router that had cofee in, it just lose the capacity to save config.. I gave it to a friend who do not matter about config, still running, 10 years old !

I really appreciate all your inputs, lots of interesting info/links in this thread !  Thanks to all !

was my 2 satoshi !

+1 (I have often thought about this) so I wonder how that 49 port psu powered hub/board slows down 49 333's communicating? thats a lot of info squeezed into the smaller pipe.

Why are people still farting around with USB ASICs? Am I missing something here?