[Galaxy S 4 Accessories] Hawke84:
Hi all,

Im trying to get into tech blogging and reviewing stuff, so I thought I'd kick it off with a review of a USB hub, something people take for granted and no one ever seems to review! so here goes, im going to share with you mt thoughts on my new toy! Any feedback on my review would be greatly appreciated.

Just as a note, I dont work for Inatech, I work for a Pharmaceutical company and just enjoy technology :)

As an Update I've just spotted on their website there is an off on at the moment for back to school or something so there are voucher codes for some products including the USB hub :D

http://www.inateck.com/back-to-school/

Testing out a new toy, USB3 four port hub with USB OTG for mobile.

I'll be testing it on my PC which has 2 USB3 ports (Asus P8P67 Deluxe motherboard) and on my trusty Samsung Galaxy S4.

Unboxing and device overview

The hub arrived from Amazon, well packaged, no instructions, just the hub and a Returns and Exchanges piece of paper listing the companies policies.

Taking the hub out I was actually surprised with how well made and solid it felt, i've previously only had cheap USB hub so this is my first proper one. The housing feels like a thick plastic and around the top 3 USB ports there is what feels like brushed aluminium adding to the premium feel. There is a forth USB port on the other end of the hub making this a 4 port USB3 hub.

The cable that comes with it is 12 inches long, as the company says on their website, this is intended for phones and ultrabooks not for down the back of a PC, but feel free to use a USB 3 extension lead to use it with a PC. At the end of the USB3 lead is a little USB OTG adaptor which is attached to the main usb lead with a length of thin plastic which is formed from the outer housing of the USB OTG connector. Not sure how long this will last and keep the OTG adapter attached, felt like if you gave it a bit of abuse eventually it would wear out.

Overall if feels quite premium and solid. Let get onto the testing!

Testing

Ok everyone case most about android devices here so i'll do that first and the PC testing as an after thought!

Testing on the Samsung Galaxy S4 (i9505), plugging it in, it detected it as a "USB Connector" no problem. Ok lets plug some stuff in and see how far I can push the poor phone!

First up a Transcend USB3 stick, connected no problem . To test the speed I used A1 SD Benchmark from the play store. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.a1dev.sdbench&hl=en

On my PC the device (Tested with USBdeview) gets write speed of about 90mb/s and read or 18mb/s. On the phone it gets read 26mb/s and write 18mb/s, so a bit slower than plugged into PC but the Galaxy S4 doesnt support USB OTG ad USB3 speeds so its as expected. Just to check that the Inateck hub isnt slowing things down lets test it with my normal USB OTG adaptor, the results - exactly the same speed. So the hub isnt slowing things down.

Lets try 2 USB sticks :D Since im poor I can only afford 1 USB3 pendrive so the others are usb2. I have an OCZ Rally 2 4GB and a Texet 2GB, lets plug them all in and see if the phone can handle storage overload! 3 USB sticks plugged in and the power hasnt given up, all 3 are lit up and ES File explorer detects them as USBDriveA, B and C no problems on each.

Lets push my luck and try a forth! again no problem, 4 usb devices attached to the unpowered hub and its not a problem! Tapping the unmount option from the notification bar will unmount ALL the usb drives at once, tad annoying but its a Samsung thing and seeing as I wasnt expecting the phone to be able to power 4 devices at once im happy!

Final test I have for this poor device is keyboard, mouse and USB3 drive copying files all going at once. The benchmark app wouldnt let me multi-task and write an email while benchmarking so i just moved the mouse around a lot but it didnt affect the transfer speeds during the test. The keyboard, mouse and usb pen drive all worked no problem when plugged in.

Ok so thats how well the hub performs on an android device, im pretty pleased so far, i feel like i really pushed it and it was fine, but so far its no different to the cheap hub i bought on ebay that comes apart quite easily. The real thing with this is the USB3 functionality so lets plug it into a USB3 port already and see how well it performs at speed!

Ok plugging in the device, Windows 7 detected it no problem.

It worked fine in a USB 2 port or a USB 3 port.

Again the same pendrive, lets test the speed. Plugged directly into the PC I get Read 18mb/s and write 90mb/s on my Transcend drive.

[IMG="Speed test without the hub"]http://xdaforums.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=2898396&d=1408115686[/IMG]

[IMG="Speed test with the hub"]http://xdaforums.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=2898395&d=1408115679[/IMG]

So thats all good, lets see how it performs through the hub. As you can see from the pictures above the hub doesnt slow things down when using 1 port.

The only other USB3 Devices I have are a 3TB hard drive so lets speed test then with and without the hub and see if the hub is going to slow things down. When using my 3TB hard drive and the USB Pen drive the results were similar to using a single device, no slow down (i dont want to flood this thread with screen shots)

The results look pretty nice, no slowdown with or without the usb hub even when I pushed things speed testing.

Overall Im actually quite pleased with this little device and it will replace my Cheap USB hub im using at the moment.

Hope everyone found this useful!

Heres the link to their website, i got mine from Amazon UK.

http://www.inateck.com/inateck-hb4002g-4-port-usb-3-0-hub-otg/