USBism

XP Pro, SP3, current updates, Comodo, A^2, Lenovo T60p Dual CPU - 2.1 ghz, 15.6" screen, 3 Gb computer memory, 3 cent operator memory

I need to learn some plain English, rubber hits the road stuff about USB. I simply can not remember stuff I read in techy documents, even if I could find elementary comments among the techno-babble.

How "stackable" is USB? I'd guess USB2 would be more so than USB1.

1. Are there limits similar to those in memory blocks and drive sectors, etc.?

2. How many ports could a good engineer put in one powered hub? I've had a 9 port powered hub working faultlessly for a couple of years.

3. Big 3 - could more than one hub be plugged into different USB ports on the computer? I'd guess USB2 could do more than USB1?

4. Could a small hub be plugged into a bigger hub that is working?

I got a 4 port hub for my SIL and decided to make sure it worked. But when I plugged it into a port on my laptop (a port I use regularly, things went very sour. Other USB stuff started malfunctioning intermittently. My USB extension hard drive quit working for several reboots. My USB mouse was off and on. Swapping the hub among other ports made no difference.

Would a person need to manually install additional drivers to handle more ports or is it a firmware thing? Or neither?

At one point I got the small hub to co-exist with everything else - that is the tones came up right. But when I plugged a flash drive into it things went batty again. Without the hub and with the flash drive in a laptop port it works fine, but she's out of ports on her old desktop.

It occurs to me to ask, are the drivers not able to work with each other above a certain number? Or is the hardware the limitation? Has anybody ever woken up and started writing memory management for infinite memory. There ARE OS's that do it.

Does any of this stuff come in plain English?

 

I think USB was designed to daisychain 128 devices. The main issue is usually USB power vs unpowered devices. I only use powered hubs, so many devices use the power either to operate (usb drives) or charge (ipods, etc). Also using remove device option turns the hub off, then I have to go into device manager and select my usb hub and then scan hardware for it to pick up anything I plug in next.
For real answers I'd go to usbman.com or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB for more specific info.

 

Thanks.

Real answers... That Wiki article is exactly the kind of thing that blows my mind ever since the stroke I had at age 47.

I suppose a person with a normal memory could dig out of it the answers to my primary questions about using more than one hub on a computer, but by the time I ever get to page 3 I've forgotten page 1. I remember star and tree topologies since they had pictures of them, but I still have no clue about adding another hub - the "rubber hits the road" issue.

I remember something about a "main node." I don't know if that would be in the system or in the powered hub. If it is in the system it would stand to reason that any port on the laptop would accept a hub, but that doesn't work. Maybe I'll try plugging the small hub into the powered hub, but I really wanted to get something to go on before I did that.

 

Googling daisychain usb hubs, there are a few poeple that have asked about that. Hopefully google is not to mind blowing.
http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?t=60236
http://usb-hub-review.toptenreviews.com/usb-hubs-daisy-chaining-bandwidth-and-power-demands.html

As far as how many ports, the design was 127, you can get hubs with 24 ports or more see
http://www.everythingusb.com/usb-hubs.html

They also make stackable USB hubs,

I dont get question #1
#2 here is 49 ports
#3 Yes, from personal experience I put an internal 4 port power hub in my computers and I have plugged another hub into the computer with no issue. USB 1 vs 2 is all about speed, not number of devices.
#4 Yes I have plugged a hub into my internal (front panel) powered usb hub again with no issues. (daisychaned)

Like I said I don't use unpowered hubs at all.

 

Thanks.

Question 1? No biggie. Go to the most elementary reason any computer operation has limits. They all have something in common. Rules defining the maximum allowable whatever. (Concepts I'm good at.) At one time at least, the Motorola languages were never hard coded that way, rather had resettable values dependent on on your hardware resources. Memory for anything could be located and relocated to anywhere on the chips. If you ran out of memory, reset the allowable figure and add more. If you ran out of hard drive space, add a dozen teras and reset that. If you ran out of space for settings you reset that. Code was re-entrant. Stacks were re-sizable. Etc., etc. Intel is VCR, Motorola is BETA.