Laptops these days don’t come with many USB ports — and if your laptop has a USB-C port or two, then you may find yourself with no full-size USB-A ports at all. (Cough, MacBook, cough.) That’s where this USB-C to USB-A hub from ICZI comes in — it turns one USB-C port into seven USB 3.0 ports. That should be more than enough ports for even the most dedicated peripheral owner, right? We’ve been sent a sample from ICZI, so let’s put this USB-C hub to the test!
Features & Specifications
- Input: 7x USB 3.0 ports, 1x mains adapter
- Output: 1x USB Type-C port
- Dimensions: 116 x 42 x 14.5 mm (4.56 x 1.65 x 0.57 inches)
- Weight: 59 grams
- Contents: USB hub, power adapter, user manual
Design
This USB port has a simple but effective design, with three USB ports on one side and four on the other.
The side with the three USB ports also has an AC adapter input, which can be helpful when plugging in power-hungry peripherals like backlit keyboards and hard drives. ICZI note that the peripherals shouldn’t consume more than 900mAm for best performance.
The 7 Port Hub connects to your computer via a USB-C cable about half a foot long.
Testing
In order to test out the USB-C 7-Port Hub, we connected a USB flash drive (the Kingston Technology 32 GB DataTraveler SE9 G2) and tested its speed using CrystalDiskMark during three different scenarios:
- when connected directly to an XPS 15 9560 laptop
- when connected via the hub
- and when connected to a populated hub with several USB devices connected.
Ideally, sequential data transfer speeds should be similar between all three tests; we don’t want to see a drop in throughput even when the hub is loaded. Here are the results.
The test results show no significant speed differences, even when the hub is loaded up with multiple peripherals at once.
We didn’t run into any other issues with our testing, apart from the aforementioned incompatibility with 2.4GHz wireless devices. For connecting keyboards, flash drives, mice, gamepads, SD card readers and the like, this should be an ideal hub.
We also used the hub to connect to a USB-C smartphone, allowing us to connect a USB keyboard and mouse — pretty useful!
Wrapping up
Enter peripheral paradise with this sleek and stylish USB-C hub. It has a few flaws — it’s annoying you can’t connect 2.4GHz wireless devices, for instance — but for the price, we can’t complain too much.
- Buy from Amazon.co.uk – £35.99
- Buy from Amazon.com – $23.99
- Buy from Amazon.de – EUR 36,99
- Buy from Amazon.ca – CDN $37.99
