AGPTek USB-C Hub for the M1 Mac Mini

Hey guys, welcome to elevated systems. I'm your host cj and some of you know that I recently purchased the new mac

mini

m1 and have been putting it through its paces to see how it can handle my daily workload and although I have a full desktop computer so powerful in this factor of Ultra-compact shape is quite interesting coming from the world of PCs. When I actually started working with it, I found that the lack of expandability and limitations were somewhat detrimental to my workflow, not to mention the peripherals I needed. I started messing up my desk so I went on Amazon and started looking for a solution that would

mini

mize some of the extra things I had plugged into this little machine and I found this agp tech USB hub so let's get this out of here. look what it comes with and i can show you the things i was able to eliminate thanks to this so first is the hub itself which i'll get to in a minute but first i want to talk about this cable this agp tech hub is marketed as a usbc hub and thanks to clever and sometimes misleading marketing, many people believe that makes it faster.

In fact, before purchasing this concentrator I looked up reviews on youtube about it and couldn't find any on this specific one, but I did find a few. on very similar hubs and one reviewer even said to look for USBC accessories because they are faster, which is not necessarily true. USBC only refers to the shape of the connector. This cable is the perfect example. This is a USBC connector. Now it's just a USB. Cable with the same transfer speeds In this case, this is a USB 3.0 or now known as USB hub USB 3.1 Gen1, which means it has maximum transfer speeds of 5 gigabits per second.

It gets confusing because usb 3.1 gen 1 and gen 2 can have usb a or usb usbc. connectors, but when you get to USB 3.2, where we reach transfer speeds of 20 gigabits per second, there are usually only Type C connectors, as well as USB4, which is what the Mac mini has, so on the one hand we are limited at five gigabits per second. This hub, but knowing that and thanks to this cable, if you don't want to take up one of the Mac Mini's high-speed Thunderbolt 3 USB 4 ports, you can simply connect it to one of the USB 3.1 gen1 ports without losing performance. loss as you only get five gigabits per second speeds even if you are connected to the 40 gigabits per second Thunderbolt 4 so there you have it that was my quick lesson on USB protocols let's look at this hub and why I chose this one in instead of The first most popular feature of the satechi hub I was looking for were USB ports that I can access from the front of the computer and this one has two USB 2 ports which may seem outdated but if you use a wired keyboard or mouse or Even a wireless one with an RF dongle, these still use USB2, there are also two USB 3.1 Gen1 ports, as well as two SD card readers, one standard and one mini, which can be used simultaneously.

It lacks a USBC interface like the Satachi, but again, the Satachi is also a USB 3. hub, so its USBC port is limited to the same five gigabits per second transfer speeds as the USB A port anyway, The final feature of this hub is the reason I chose it and that is because it is not just a USB hub, it is also a 2.5 inch SSD enclosure. And I happen to have a 500 gigabyte SSD that I can slide in here. Now you can install a 2.5-inch mechanical hard drive here if you want. If you do, a couple of foam pads are included that you glue to the bottom. of the case to help absorb drive vibrations, there's no real need to use them with an SSD, just slide it in and screw the cover on with the attached screws and screwdrivers.

Now thanks to this I can get rid of my USB hub, my SD card. readers and my external ssd and replace them all with a single neat accessory that doesn't really take up extra space on my desk some of the other features of the agb tab hub first the color and finish are identical to the mac there are also anti-rubber pads Non-slip on the bottom so you can put it under the Mac or if you want a smaller space between the two you can put it on top without damaging the finish or scratching the map. All dimensions are exact so it lines up perfectly.

Performance-wise, you're again limited to USB 3 speeds, but keep in mind that USB 3 transfer speeds are still theoretically up to 625 megabytes per second, which is theoretically faster than the 600 megabytes per second the specifications say. three speeds. In fact, the SSD I installed is rated at 550 megabytes per second read and 500 megabytes per second, of course, those numbers are maximum sequential reference numbers. I ran some tests in more realistic conditions. I first checked the speeds of the SD readers for this test. I used a Sandisk Extreme Pro uh s1. SD card with a read speed of 170 megabytes per second, which again is the maximum sequential speed.

Typically transfer speeds when ingesting mp4 and jpeg or raw files for my camera are between 85 and 105 megabytes per second for this test. I had 36.44 gigabytes of data consisting of mp4 and jpeg files and I transferred them first using my USB 3 SD card reader plugged directly into one of the Mac's USB ports and the files transferred in six minutes and 35 seconds with a average transfer speed of 92.3 megabytes per second. I then connected it to the agp tech hub and I transferred the same files first to the internal mac drive and then again to the ssd I just installed in the hub.

Both operations finished in exactly the same 6 minutes and 32 seconds, I finally added a mini SD card to the mini SD. card reader in the hub this card contained approximately 30 gigabytes of the same type of data. I transferred both cards simultaneously to the external drive, which took 11 minutes and 55 seconds, which is exactly the same amount of time it took to transfer each card one at a time. time, so it wasn't faster to transfer simultaneously, but it wasn't slower either, as is the case with basically all the multi-slot SD card readers I currently own, so the SD card readers perform as well or better than the ones I use. my workstation computer now let's see how the external drive I installed here first works, I connected the ssd to a sata connection on my workstation computer and ran the Crystal Disk Mark benchmark and got read and write speeds of 549 megabytes per second and 436 megabytes per second. second respectively now on the hub, the same benchmark on Mac resulted in a read speed of 288 megabytes per second and a write speed of 341 megabytes per second, so not as fast as a direct sata connection, but That's to be expected since the hub has to convert the sata connection from the ssd to usb, but again, this is a benchmark, so let's see how it works with real world use again.

I transferred the same 36.44 gigabytes of data first from the external ssd to the maximum internal ssd which took two minutes and 24 seconds with an average speed of 253 megabytes per second, then I transferred it from the internal drive to the external drive and that operation took three minutes and 39 seconds at 166 megabytes per second, finally for the real world test I did 11 minutes. davinci resolve project by reading all the media and writing the output to the external drive which completed in 16 minutes and 24 seconds, then I rendered the exact same project this time by reading the media and writing the output to the internal drive max and that took 16 minutes and 11 seconds, so just 13 seconds faster I can live with that, especially considering the extra capacity of the external drive, I generated the project as h.264.

If I had gone with something like the prores 422 hq I probably would have run out of space on the internal drive, okay I guess it's time to wrap this up with my thoughts on the agp tech USB hub for the mac mini m1 overall, the features, Aesthetics and performance were excellent, all high marks, the only con I have is the price of 73 US dollars. I think it's a little pricey considering it only replaced 50 accessories worth of adding a convenience tax and I'd say this one would be more appropriately priced at around $60, but then again it's still about seven dollars cheaper than the very popular Satechi Hub and that's not it.

I don't even have a drive bay so I guess despite what I believe price should be the value of a product is what consumers are willing to pay and after all I bought it so if you're considering purchasing it, I hope this review helped you. To make that decision, you can find a link to agp tech hub in the description below. This is an affiliate link, so any purchase made helps the channel at no additional cost to you. It would also be great to like and subscribe to the channel, but That's all for this one guys, hope to see you in the next one until then, stay safe.