7-9 Port Hubs

At seven to nine ports a USB hub stops being a travel accessory and becomes the centre of a desk — keyboard, mouse, webcam, drives, card readers and a monitor all landing on one connection to the laptop.

The thing to check at this size is power. A bus-powered hub shares the host port’s power budget between everything plugged in, which is fine for keyboards and mice and unreliable for portable hard drives and charging. A hub with its own power supply gives each port full current, and at this port count it is usually the right choice.

Second, look at what the ports actually are. Many models here are USB-C docks rather than plain hubs: they add HDMI for a monitor, SD and microSD card readers, Ethernet, and Power Delivery pass-through so the laptop charges through the same cable that carries everything else. That combination is what replaces a proper docking station.

Check the speed too — USB 3.2 Gen 1 is 5Gbps, Gen 2 is 10Gbps.

The range covers TP-Link, StarTech, Hama, Verbatim, Lindy and HYPER.