Yeah, USB hubs are nice for adding USB ports, and/or putting them all in the same convenient place, but a powered hub can also save your often expensive hardware. Its USB ports are isolated from those on your PC or laptop, and all the power used comes from a plugin adapter, rather than through the PC or laptop electronics.
USB sticks do go bad, but they don’t use much current and they’re unlikely to take anything else with them. The same cannot be said for many external drives and other accessories that plug into a USB port. I’ve had for example a USB sound card device short out and burn up a powered USB hub – if I’d had that plugged directly into the PC, those melted chips would have been on the motherboard. Needless to say, I’d much rather toss a $20 hub in the trash.
A 2nd reason is something I’ve just discovered… I’d been perhaps overly naïve, thinking that something as well engineered as a PC motherboard would certainly conform to USB specs. I was wrong, and there’s not really any excuse, since I’ve got a dongle that acts as a USB passthrough and gives you voltage and current readings [these devices are both readily available and cheap]. Turns out the motherboard in this PC often puts out less than the 5-volt spec, and that’s cost me LOTs of time and a bit of money, apparently damaging several keyboards.
I bought a [for me] expensive mechanical keyboard, and it didn’t last a year. I bought the first of what would turn out to be 5 Logitech mechanical keyboards with the refund. They lasted on average 4 months before I had to go through the warranty process. And I bought a Much cheaper mechanical keyboard for those times when I was waiting for a warranty replacement. Cheap mechanical keyboards using Chinese clones of the popular Cherry switches had become available, and are now plentiful, though the difference in quality is very apparent. So far that cheap keyboard hasn’t failed. Nor has the wireless keyboard using Logitech [rather than Cherry] switches that Logitech sent me as a last resort.
I had thought the problem was the Cherry brand switches, though countless others, including my son, have used keyboards with Cherry switches for years without complaint (?). On a hunch I decided to measure the USB voltage, found it was often too low, and when I couldn’t find anything about it using Google, decided to try one of the broken Logitech keyboards with a powered hub. It worked. It would also seem to explain why the wireless keyboard worked – I had the wireless dongle plugged into a powered hub sitting on my desktop. Now I have no idea whether the previously broken keyboard will continue to work, and for how long, but since it worked OK for several months, I have to assume there was some damage done to its electronics by the low voltage.
USB voltage meters on Amazon:
amazon[.]com/s?k=usb+voltage+meter&ref=nb_sb_noss_1