Best Practices for USB Drives with Surface Book?

[Jesse Segovia]

I'm guessing if I have two USB external drives I should connect them both directly to the two USB ports in my Surface Book. But if I want to use additional drives or sync my iPhone, etc., what's the best way to go? Should I keep my main external drive plugged into one of the USB ports and plug everything else into a USB hub plugged into the second port, or should I plug everything into the hub and connect only that directly to the Surface Book?

I may eventually spring for the new Surface dock but even that will only give me a total of four USB ports so I would still need a USB hub since I have more than four total external drives and devices to sync.

And is it worthwhile using a USB hub that is not USB 3.0? Is that going to result in too slow speeds and/or errors?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Wayne Orwig]

WiFi. Does your access point have a USB port?
I sync and backup my smartphone wirelessly. Not that much data there.
I do normal Book (laptop) backups wirelessly, since day to day data changes don't have a lot of data. I do occasionally plug my backup disk directly into the USB 3 port, but only when I make an image of the hard disk for safe keeping.

 

[kimknapp]

Jesse,
I use a small hub and don't see much difference between the different combinations you mentioned on my Yoga 2 Pro.
If yours is an i7, 16GB, 512GB, I wonder if you could tell me whether you have had any problems transferring files to your external USB drives. I returned my SB because it was not working properly. Try transferring a large folder of files, like 10GB. Symptoms I was seeing was the system locking up. What actually happened was the external drives were disconnected by the OS. Sometimes the files that did transfer were corrupted.

If it works, I may take my external drive to BestBuy and try again.

Kim