The Worlds only fully internal USB hub thingy - By Gutenaffe

[Kaolian]

Welll, A while back I commissioned a piece of work from one of our own forum members, Gutenaffe. I wanted a USB hub, but i wanted it to go inside my case, run off of internal 4 pin molex power, and have motherboard style header pins instead of external usb plugs. A tall order huh? Well, Gutenaffe delivered. I just finished installing what is to my knowledge the only fully internal USB hub in existance.

The hub started out life as a $19.00 USB 2.0 hub from Newegg.com
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=17-183-101&depa=0

It's roughly 3 inches long, and 1/2 inch wide. I ordered it and had it shipped to Gutenaffe, along with sending him a very reasonable fee for his work (all told the entire project was under $50, though since that was the first one he may need to adjust prices if he will be doing more of them, you'll have to take that up with him.)

He then removed the top cover of the hub, along with the external style USB ports and replaced them with standard 5 pin headers (adding a wire for pin 5) The hub was then modified with a 4 pin Molex relay.

THe wire from the hub is a nice braided aluminum covered piece that plugs into one end of the hub and plugs directly into a free header slot on the other end.

GUtenaffe also included 5 five pin USB blocks for converting 10 pin blocks to fit on the hub.

I will post pictures in a bit.

Installation and operation couldn't be simpler. The pinout was clearly visable on the board itself. It mounts anywhere in the chassy using a piece of supplied heat resistant adhesive tape. A screw in frame would also have been quite easy to construct had I so desired. No drivers were required, it detected just like a standard USB hub, and i am confident that you could easily chain more than one together inside the case if you needed that many headers.

Overall, this device is wonderful. it's exactly what I asked for, it was well constructed, delivered very fast, and is one of those things that will be useful as long as there are USB ports on computers. I'm sure a firewire hub could also be modified the same way.

No more nonfunctional USB ports on my case, 10 out of 10!

[Guttenaffe]

I've been getting lots of PM of late asking me for pics, this isn't the one I did for Kaolian but for another person, I've done about 5 of these for diffrent people now.
High-Res Image:http://img72.imageshack.us/img72/507/img20441zv.jpg (http://img72.imageshack.us/my.php?image=img20441zv.jpg)
Thanks to ImageShack for Free Image Hosting (http://imageshack.us)
Sorry people I just don't have the time to make these for people anymore. I will write a "How-To" for people to follow, but I don't know when that might be.

[Slug Toy]

excellent, i had this idea bouncing around in the back of my head for a while, and then i forgot it. now i know its possible.

the next step... figuring out how to interface a USB hub with an SATA hard drive so you could have a home made solid state hard drive. why? i dont really know... i guess that famous quote comes into play... "because i can". im sure it can be done now... with a little electronics expertise and the right supplies.

[Guttenaffe]

You mean somthing like this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16812156014

[Slug Toy]

well not exactly. im thinking more like an array of USB drives that can plug into an SATA port and act as a hard drive.

[EPYK]

so what you want is a SATA JBOD of flash memory

[EPYK]

here i got something for you

sata flash drive (http://www.adtron.com/products/A35fb-SerialATAFlashDisk.html)

[Slug Toy]

interesting. i like it. now i wonder if someone can slap something together at home to do somethign similar.

[EPYK]

let me rub my brain on it for a lil bit

[Omega]

Making an internal USB hub wouldn't be too difficult methinks. A bit of manipulation of wires and connectors and it should work. Now, making it so that it uses the internal connecter may be a bit harder, but you can use a normal hub.

Just a little bit of electronics expericence and knowing what cables are what is all ya need ;)

[EPYK]

i would think its harder then that, first the format of usb and sata are differant and i really think he wants to take many usb pen drives and get them to act as one hard drive, which means you will need a sort of raid controller for the flash devices.
like a sata usb bus that supports jbod/raid 0,1,1/0,5.....
if thats the case, lets get started on that project

[Slug Toy]

haha, that would be a pretty big project. is it even possible get a hold of the hardware responsible for controlling that jbod and raid stuff?

this almost sounds like you would need to take a raid controller, and replace the sata plugs with sata-usb converters to make it work. or maybe you could try to "embed" the usb drives into a board if you have enough electronics knowledge... so its more like an onboard cache but bigger and more useful.

[EPYK]

ok this morning i had a huge idea.....

if we can get this to work things would most likely just get cooler

couple this:
http://images.tomshardware.com/2005/09/07/can_gigabyte/i-ram-top.jpg

with an actual hard drive (of equal space)on a raid formation

[Omega]

i would think its harder then that, first the format of usb and sata are differant




stoooooooop right there. please cite where i mentioned anything about SATA?

[EPYK]

you didnt, slugtoy did.... and these things morph into whatever anyone wants them to...