As you may know, my MacBook is my main machine. Since I prefer a desktop setup when at home, I’m constantly switching between my mobile and desktop modes. When I’m in desktop mode, I have a number of devices which need to be hooked up to my MacBook. I have my monitor, speakers, power, keyboard, mouse, iPod, printer, and few other USB gadgets.
To make my life easier when switching to desktop mode, I came up with a cleaver USB setup. I was able to reduce the amount of USB cables which needed to be plugged in by running everything through the hub in my Apple USB keyboard. When getting setup, all I would have to do is plug in my keyboard which contained my mouse and a powered USB hub. The powered hub contained the rest of my USB gadgets. While this setup certainly worked, I didn’t take into consideration what was going on behind the scenes, which came back to haunt me tonight.
Tonight, I was setting up a new external hard drive, and noticed transferring data took forever. I was trying to copy an episode of Family Guy to the drive, and it took around 30 minutes to copy. Something didn’t seem right, considering it was a local drive. After a number of performance tests brought me to the conclusion that the drive was only operating at 2 Mb/s, I began to troubleshoot why the drive was performing that slow.
Thankfully, my first idea was right on the money. I opened up System Profiler and checked out the specs on the drive. It was only reporting a transfer speed of 12Mb/s. Not what I wanted to see. I then began going through the chain of USB devices, checking their speeds along the way. Wouldn’t you know that the Apple keyboard’s hub only supported a transfer speed 12Mb/s. While that’s fine for an additional device such as a mouse, I wasn’t going to get far with my new external drive.
A few minutes later I was reconfiguring my setup. This time my powered USB hub is the first device, with my keyboard feeding into that. Now all my devices receive their full intended transfer speed, and I still have the convenience of only having to plug in one device.
So, what does this all mean? Just because something works, doesn’t mean it’s the best possible method. This applies to everything from coding to the real life. Double check your work and consider alternatives before signing off on the first thing that comes to mind. It will save you a lot of time in the end.
6 Comments
I wish they made docking stations for the laptops. Will make things much easier, wouldn’t it?
I used my Apple USB keyboard to transfer files from a PC multiple times using a 1GB flash drive. Apparently this didn’t og over too well because the next day my keyboard was dead. Apple’s shipping a new one, and I’ll be plugging my drive directly into my Mac Mini from now on.
Sorry to hear that Brad. At least Apple is sending you a new keyboard.
After hearing your story, I think Apple needs to include some documentation with the keyboard. I thought it was just a regular USB 2.0 hub, and I’m sure a lot of other people think the same thing.
I’m suprised there isn’t some kind of Apple and or 3rd party USB docking station for the MacBooks. I know they are quite common now a days for PCs, because alot of laptop companys have stopped providing docking stations with their laptops. Dell Latitudes are the only laptops I know of that still have company made docking stations.
I know there is one company which is working on one. They have already have docking stations for other Apple models, it’s just the MacBook is still fairly new (only about four months old).
Even if there was a docking station available, I still prefer my current method. It works well for what I need.
Well more of an Apple product, like how Dell has with their’s sits right in it, i can get a monitor stand and it is like a regular PC just not…and you can undock it later on, i think it works well enough for me at work.