Need help troubleshooting USB hub issue

iTsYaBoiii · February 21, 2020

Hello everyone!

Bit of a more obscene topic when it comes to peripherals but I've been having issues with USB hubs recently.
I just fried my 3rd USB hub today (within the span of around 1 month) and I'm at a loss as to what the cause is.

Some context about this:
I use a laptop for work, however I dock it with a docking station and I also have an extra USB hub since I need a lot of USB type-A ports for work.
I've had the hubs plugged into the laptop directly as well as daisy chaining it to the docking station.
In both scenarios I had a hub get fried.
What I mean when I say fried is that they do not carry any data - Windows stops recognizing them and I've already tested these hubs on different systems just to make sure its not my laptops acting up.
Curious thing is though - the power delivery on these hubs still works (i.e. they still charge phones) however data transfer is completely dead.
The ports that the hubs were connected to (both on the laptop and docking station) are also fine and still work as expected.

My question - what is causing this to happen?
Initially I thought that it might be the power bricks being connected to an unstable power source, however I feel like if it was this, the power delivery on the hubs would die as well.
My second guess was that it might be the specific USB port on my laptop, however even when I used the docking station to connect it, the hub still died.
I've also tried different manufacturers for these hubs and it seems to always end the same way (just within different amounts of time).

I'm at a loss and would really want to not fry more of these...

Any and all help would be welcome.

VenomizerX · February 21, 2020

Try manually installing the drivers for the hub in Device Manager if the hub still gets detected by your laptop.

iTsYaBoiii · February 21, 2020

12 minutes ago, VenomizerX said:

Try manually installing the drivers for the hub in Device Manager if the hub still gets detected by your laptop.

I've tried reinstalling the drivers and also tried using a different laptop. Get the device malfunctioned notification in both scenarios. I think it is a hardware issue, just can't come to a conclusion as to what causes it