As a self-ascribed computer geek, I have more than my fair share of USB peripherals attached to my computer at any given point in time: a microphone, an iPod, a keyboard, trackball mouse, several external hard drives, a few thumb drives, a digital camera cable, a Wacom tablet, and a scanner, just to name a few.
What’s in the box:
The problem?

I have several USB peripherals that I need to use on a regular basis, but the number of built-in USB ports that come with my computer are not enough. What I needed was a USB hub.

There are two major types of USB hubs on the market: self-powered and bus-powered. A bus-powered USB hub uses the computer's built-in USB port as a power source for the hub, while a self-powered USB hub comes with an external power supply that plugs into an AC outlet. The big advantage of a self-powered USB hub is that it can provide sufficient current (500mA) to all its ports, without straining the computer's own power supply.

For this review, I am reviewing a self-powered USB hub: the NewerTech 7-port USB 2.0 Hub with power supply (or NewerTech USB hub for short).

What's in the box:

The NewerTech USB hub comes complete with everything you need. There's the hub itself, which has 7 individual USB ports, an AC 3.5 amp power supply, a USB cable and documentation.

Set-up
Set-up was incredibly easy. First, plug the AC power connector in, then plug one end of the supplied USB cable into the NewerTech hub and the other into one of your built-in USB ports on your computer. At that point, you can plug up to 7 USB devices into the NewerTech USB hub. There are no drivers to install. This device is truly plug and play. The USB ports on the NewerTech hub are all USB 2.0/USB 1.1 compliant.

The unit itself is portable, with a durable aluminum enclosure, and ideal for carrying on-the-go.

Using the NewerTech hub
In my testing, the NewerTech hub recognized all my USB devices with no problems whatsoever. Also worth noting, the temperature on the NewerTech hub remained cool to the touch. External drives mounted just as fast when plugged into the NewerTech hub, compared to plugging the same device into the computer's built-in USB ports. Each USB port on the unit is hot-swappable – meaning that you can plug and unplug devices without having to power down the hub. Bear in mind that if you have external USB drives attached to the hub, and you're using a Macintosh, you will want to first eject the drives from the desktop before unplugging the hard drive.

Tests
To provide some quantitative results as to the NewerTech USB hub's performance, I first tested the built-in USB ports of my Macbook Pro to determine the overall speed, using my Maxtor OneTouch portable 160GB drive. The standard suite of tests (run with SpeedTools) on the Macbook Pro's built-in USB ports yielded a read speed average of 27.556 MB/sec and a write speed of close to 31 MB/sec.

This held through fairly consistently on files between 2MB all the way up to 100MB in size as the graphs below.

And now, the same data sets with drive connected to the NewerTech USB hub.

Conclusion
From the graphs, I noted that the NewerTech 7-port USB hub provides the same level of performance as the built-in USB port on the Macbook Pro. This is exactly what one would expect. At $28 + shipping, the NewerTech 7-port USB hub is an affordable and quality choice for anyone looking to add more USB ports to their computer. I'm overall very satisfied with the unit. It's well built. It works as advertised. It's portable and affordable. I do have one feature request, and that would be the addition of an LED indicator light to let me know when power is active to the unit.

The NewerTech 7-port USB hub earns a 4.5/5 Bob Weiner rating.

Highly recommended.