Having been looking for a powered USB hug to replace the junk one that came with our rock band kit I’ve learned two things. One, it’s hard to find any one hub that people can recommend. It seems the quality of almost every hub is hit or miss at best. Two it’s hard to find one that stands out. VIZO has been kind enough to send one of their “UFO” USB hubs along with a power kit. Let’s find out how they perform.
Review Sample Provided by: VIZO
Review By: Garfi3ld
Pictures by: Garfi3ld
Packaging
As I said before, we are reviewing two items, the UFO hub and the power kit needed to make it a powered hub. The packaging on the power adapter is very simple. In fact if it wasn’t for the barcode on the bottom I wouldn’t believe that it was meant to be sold in retail. There is no doubt that it is intended to be packaged with other items, specifically a “VIZO 2.5” Hard Drive External Enclosure” according to the box. Inside the power brick hub box is the power brick along with a US power prong adapter.
As for the UFO, it comes in your standard plastic bubble packaging. Normally I get upset about bubble packaging but VIZO made sure to make it easy to open and even reseal if you need too. They used a bright green on most of the front that makes the black hub stand out. They also have a very nice logo for UFO. All of it put together will get your attention and would look great on a store shelf. The back is also in the same green. They list off all of the features of the hub. The most notable one would be that the hub is compatible with USB 1 and 2, this means it supports transfers up to 480 Mbps, ether way will work great on our rock band equipment. But this is very important if you are hooking up multiple external hard drives or anything else that needs high transfer speeds.
Performance
In order to judge the performance of the USB hub we decided to test it in two ways. As stated before, our original intention was to use this hub to replace our bad rock band USB hub. We wouldn’t want to have any problems at our next lan’s “battle of the bands” like we had at our last one. Secondly we tested the performance of an external hard drive with it plugged into the hub and then tested it with it plugged directly into the computer.
Our Rock Band testing is a compatibility testing and durability. After remembering to plug in the power we didn’t have any problems playing a 4 person band through the UFO hub. As for the durability, we tend to get a little out of hand when rocking out. It’s a given that at some point someone is going to pull the cord out. When this happened (a few times) it didn’t cause any problems with the UFO. It’s good to know you can rely on the hub. The shape didn’t cause any problems and seemed to space out the plugs to make them easy to deal with. It’s also nice to have bright green lights on when you are plugged in. This makes it easy to tell if there is a problem.
Testing the UFO with a PC using HDTach we saw similar results with and without the hub. In fact the only difference between the two tests is the average read, but I believe this is a result of a higher CPU utilization. Even then the difference was very small. Take a look at our results.
Overall
Even with the odd shape I like VIZO’s UFO. It stands up to the abuse of our rock band playing, dogs pulling on the cords, and anything else we can throw at it. It was a great replacement for our rock band kit; I have no worries about the hub failing under the abuse of our lan partys. Performance was not affected while using the hub for our USB hard drive. The round shape also makes it perfect for throwing in your laptop bad if you need more ports on the go. The dust cover spins around and keeps the ports clean while traveling. The only problem I have with the hub is how hard it is to find the power adapter for sale. But if you aren’t looking for a power hub, or have a power adapter lying around this is a good USB hub for you. With a price of $18 for the hub, and $15 it is a little on the high side. But if you look around you can find some good deals. You won’t be disappointed.
