I have a standard non-powered 4-port USB hub connected to a Surface Pro 4.
I have 3 devices plugged into the hub:
- Transmitter for keyboard/mouse
- Powered 3tb HDD
- Powered 10tb HDD
Every so often, on a fairly regular basis, the hub vanishes from Windows. The hard drives disappear from Explorer and the mouse/keyboard stops working.
15 seconds later it reconnects and everything appears again. Sometimes it happens once a day, sometimes it happens 10 times within the hour. It is seemingly random.
I'm sure this is going to kill my hard drives, so I've been trying everything I can find online to solve the issue.
Would a powered hub help in this situation or is it irrelevant since both hard drives are fully powered with their own supply?
Is there a limit on data transfer through a single USB port? It often happens when I'm copying multiple files from one drive to the other using robocopy - but it also happens when both drives are idle.
I've never had this issue when either of the drives are connected directly to the Surface, but as it only has a single USB port I'm not able to work this way.
I have disabled the option in device manager that allows Windows to turn off devices to save power.
