[Matthew Attoe]

Hi,

I was looking at the new Mac Mini and its 5 USB ports and was wondering how many would run at the full USB2 speed?

I have 3 USB2 external hard drives and often need to copy large files to/from/between them - so, is the theoretical 480mbps limit spread across all the ports at once (I'm fairly sure that not all ports offer the full 480mbps at the same time) or a just a combination of the ports? For example, ports 1+2 share the throughput, 3+4 share the throughput but are independent of 1+2, 5 has it's own 480mbps limit.

Basically, in a nutshell, would there be a best way to plug-in my 3 drives port-wise to obtain maximum throughput?

Would also like to know if this also applies to the 2 USB ports on an original Core Duo (not C2D) MBP - do the 2 USB ports share the same bandwidth limit?

Many thanks in advance,

Matthew

[olePigeon]

Hopefully they're dedicated USB ports, guess we won't know until people start buying them/examining them.

[ibook_steve]

I'm pretty sure current USB controllers don't share bandwidth at all. Each one usually has full bandwidth. Older controllers did share, but I doubt that's the case anymore.

Steve

[mduell]

I, too, doubt they're internally hubbing (modern chipsets support tons of USB channels), but unfortunately nVidia makes it much harder to find their chipset docs than Intel does.

[Simon]

You'll be fine. There's no hub in there. Each port is equal.