SotMaUSB 7 Port Hub - Powered USB 3.0 Hub - Aluminum USB Hub -USB Splitter Hub 12V 3A 36W Power Adapter

Received and plugged in 20 November 2020. 1 Feb 2021, telltale smell of ozone created by electronics frizzing out and the metal casing was hot to touch. Not great. The usb hub was plugged into a APC power filter so it didn’t surge or brown out. It died all on its own.

Product works well but if you plug in more than two cables into this, be careful because it's going to fly around all over the place if you don't secure it. It's super light so any leverage a cable has will push it all over. I've had it for a few days and it's fallen off my desk into the nether region of cable knot nightmares and unplugged a few things along with it. I just don't have any way to secure this to a wall or to my desk (which is teak and not cheap).

I selected this unit over many lower-priced models after deploying my usual evaluation strategy, which is to review the “one-star” ratings to see whether the same issues are cited multiple times by dissatisfied customers. In this instance, several hubs had many of the same angry evaluations, and this one alone appeared to be universally applauded by its purchasers.It’s considerably costlier than the low-end models, but seems solidly built, and has performed thus far without hiccoughs connected to the latest-installed computer. Worth the extra money, seems to me.

TLDR:This powered-hub is compatable with Raspberry Pi server applications.Long Version:The Raspberry Pi 4 (rpi4) is very sensitive to 'power back feeding'. In summary, if the hub sends power back to the rpi4 on USB the rpi4 will not boot as some of it's components may be damaged from over-voltage. You can test this on a non-compliant powered-hub by putting a piece of electrical tape over lead 4 within the connector and trying it again -- you'll find that it suddenly boots fine. I previously purchased a different hub (search for my review there) that had this issue. This SotMa hub has tested to work properly with my rpi4. I currently have three drives plugged into it as a NAS running OpenMediaVault (OMV).

My scenario is getting USB 16 feet away from my computer to my telescope pier. From there, it's another 9 feet to the cameras. Other brands didn't handle the traffic from three different cameras even though only one was USB 3.0. And at that, this one couldn't handle the 3.0 traffic well enough and a separate line has to be used for it because it's so intense in using up bandwidth. But at least the other cameras are now working at full speed.