I‘ve seen this 11 in 1 usb c hub on facebook marketplace and am wondering how many of these ports I could realistically use at the same time?
Does that depend on the usb-c port on my device or does the dock use some kind of magic that makes it just work.
I am asking since my wife had trouble with her dock on her macbook where an external hard drive would sometimes disconnect when other things were plugged in at the same time.
The USB outputs on the Framework have limited power output, so you’ll probably not be able to connect multiple mechanical drives or other power hungry devices.
Get a powered USB hub in case this matters. (The hub you posed can accept 100W power delivery, but I’m not sure if this only goes to the laptop, or if it can also power the other devices on the hub)
It looks like it has a USB-C connection labeled 100W. That may be an input. If that’s the case, then the rest of the ports are probably powered by that. That would be my guess
In that case, it’s theoretically possible that you could use all the other ports at the same time. All 4 ports on the FW 12 support DisplayPort pass-through, so the HDMI port on that dock could utilize that. The rest of the ports would just share the bandwidth available on the port you are connected to. So if you are connected to a 10gbps port on your laptop, the rest of the ports on that hub would have to share that bandwidth. The ports on the FW 12 aren’t super fast, so the ports on that dock would be a bit bottlenecked if used all at once, but they would probably work.
Some docks have implementation problems like that. I’ve a dock that doesn’t show the hdmi when the power is connected at the beginning. That’s the dock, not the connected computer. Other docks work flawless.
In general everything could work at the same time if the dock is implemented correctly.
The 2 display ports (VGA+HDMI) might not work at the same time. If you plan to use both, you should check if the dock supports multiple monitors. That’s a feature not implemented on all docks.
The rest of the ports are basically on a usb2/3 hub.
Yeah, that will ultimately be the biggest factor. The rest is just how fast (or not) the ports would be, as limited by the bandwidth of the connected port. At least, in my experience with docks, which admittedly, isn’t super extensive. But I have used a few with my FW 13, FW 16, and my work computer (Dell laptop).
