Home > Consumer Reviews > 2port Internal Firewire & 4portusb Hub for 3.5in Drive Bay

I've had this installed for around six months now. It's cool, and I definitely needed a way to plug USB devices into the front of my computer. I only have one Firewire device, but I'm happy to have the port for when friends want to plug their iPods into my system.

This hub is really nice for two main reasons:
1. External USB hubs cause a lot of clutter -- especially when you have as many gadgets as I do. Internal hubs are neat and tidy.
2. The fact that you can put this hub into an (almost definitely) unused 3.5 inch drive bay is very valuable, because you are far more likely to want to use the larger drive bays for other expansion in the future, but it's unlikely you'll need another 3.5 inch floppy drive -- ever ;-)

Two slight drawbacks, however:
1. As soon as I installed it, I was kicking myself for forgetting that I wanted to plug USB 2.0 devices into it. For that reason, I'm thinking about replacing this thing with a USB 2.0 compatible device.
2. One other weird thing -- this makes sense, but I hadn't really thought about it until I installed this hub -- is you have to plug it into an existing USB and Firewire port on the back of your computer. It has a USB plug and a Firewire plug that come out of the back of the computer, and then you plug it into your existing ports.

I think this is a cool product especially if you ran out on PCI slots. In case of a PCI slot however, you need to mess behind the computer. This one gives a front access which you will usually need with USB and Firewire devices. 4 USB and 2 Firewire is a great lot too.