Cambrionix 49-port USB hub for professional nerds

It's designed for professional test labs or even businesses where host-rigs must be protected against faulty USB devices. But there's nothing stopping you from decorating a living-room wall with this second-generation 49-port USB 2.0 hub from Cambrionix. Unless you consider the cost -- £399 / $657 (plus tax) -- or the fact that it requires an ATX-2 power supply to push 500mA across all 49-ports significant deterrents.

Cambrionix 49-port USB hub for professional nerds

[Thanks, dontcrossthestreams]

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 23rd 2009 8:40AM]

Where will you get the extra drive letters for all the disks??

[Oli D Posted Jul 23rd 2009 9:02AM]

It starts with AA AB on windows after you run out of letters.

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 24th 2009 2:09AM]

No it doesn't.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_letter_assignment

"It is not possible to have more than 26 mounted drives. If access to more filesystems than this is required, Volume Mount Points must be used.[6] However, it is possible to mount non-letter drives, such as 1:, 2:, or !: using the command line subst utility in Windows XP or Vista (i.e. "subst 1: c:\temp"), but this is not officially supported and may break programs that assume that all drive letters are A-Z."

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 23rd 2009 8:53AM]

I want one...

[MiniMe Posted Jul 23rd 2009 9:32AM]

Now imagine, you plug 49 Kingston 256GB USB drives into it and get nearly 12TB of solid drive storage. All of that for just $60,000.

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 23rd 2009 10:52AM]

hahah, it's a steal......

[WheresTheBeer Posted Jul 23rd 2009 10:31AM]

Couldn't they have at least made it better looking...

[OverZealous Posted Jul 23rd 2009 10:54AM]

Don't forget that this thing is effectively just 16 4-port USB hubs all daisy-chained together. Take each four-port and plug it into a second one. This gives you 8 7-port chains. Then, take 7 of those, and plug each of them into the 8th chain, leaving you with 49 usable ports, out of a total 64 "connections". Plug the last one into your host controller.

Of course, it might be more complicated than that underneath, but I would guess it really isn't. (This is also why you see 7-port USB hubs, but not 8-port ones.)

I would guess the throughput is abysmal this way, since most computers come with at least four host controller ports. This would force all of the USB data on all devices to run through one port, on one controller chip.

[OverZealous Posted Jul 23rd 2009 10:55AM]

Oops, that was supposed to be a reply. :-\

[CityZen Posted Jul 23rd 2009 11:34AM]

He's Norwegian, so "u" is pronounced "ooh", not "you".

[CityZen Posted Jul 23rd 2009 11:37AM]

Oops, that was supposed to be a reply. :-\

[SirNoDroin Posted Jul 23rd 2009 1:14PM]

i want a 127 port...that way i can MAX OUT MY BUS

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 23rd 2009 4:52PM]

If you need this, you need to get a life. Seriously, who needs 49 USB ports?

[figmentPez Posted Jul 23rd 2009 4:59PM]

This fails so hard. The peformance would absolutely suck if you used a significant portion of the ports on this thing. Watch everything slow to a crawl when you've got 49 devices plugged in... and each only gets 1/49th of the USB bandwidth, less than USB 1.1 speeds.

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 23rd 2009 5:34PM]

All that, and it is already practically obsolete what with USB 3.0 on the horizon.

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 18th 2009 1:21AM]

This is flawed, If you plug in more than 20 Flash drives, windows won't have a letter to assign to the remaining 29, however, it would work in linux.