Over the years, our devices have become sleeker and slimmer with each new iteration. This can especially be seen with laptops. It makes sense to want a lightweight PC that slips easily into a bag and can be brought along with you anywhere without slowing you down. The trade-off however has been a loss in functionality. Manufacturers are leaving more and more ports off the laptop in order to either make our stuff thinner or to make them better at surviving exposure to water. So if you have a lot of accessories that need to connect over USB, you’re going to need to pair your laptop with a solid USB hub. You can get this one from TP-Link which adds tons of connection points and is currently on sale.
Amazon has the TP-Link USB hub marked down by 22% for a limited time. Typically, you’d see this dock selling for $30. The deal takes it down by $7, meaning it will only cost you $23 at the time of writing this.
9 USB Ports in Total
The TP-Link USB hub comes with a lot of extra USB ports for you to connect to—nine to be exact. Along the face of the hub, you’ll find seven of these USB ports in a row. These are all USB 3.0 ports which are capable of data transfer at up to 5Gbps. Use these to connect a USB flash drive, an external SSD, or other devices that might need to connect via cable to you laptop, like a printer for instance.
Around the corner from this seven-port array, you’ll find two more USB ports. These two are intended for charging. They support a 5V/2.4A output and can be used to charge most devices that charge over USB. Use these to connect and power up devices like a smartphone, tablet, or Bluetooth speaker at full speed.
With the possibility of up to nine devices connected at once, TP-Link has taken precautionary measures to protect your equipment. The sophisticated circuit design makes use of multiple overheat, overload, overvoltage and short circuit protections. It utilizes a built-in surge protect which can protect both your data and the devices it is transferring to and from during the transfer process.
The whole unit is a simple plug and play solution. It requires no configuration ahead of time or drivers that need to be downloaded. Right out of the box, it is set to work with Windows, Mac OS, and Linux systems.
