Speed
To allow high-speed (USB 2.0) devices to operate in their fastest mode all hubs between the devices and the computer must be high speed. High-speed devices should fall back to full-speed (USB 1.1) when plugged in to a full-speed hub (or connected to an older full-speed computer port). While high-speed hubs can communicate at all device speeds, low and full-speed traffic is combined and segregated from high-speed traffic through a transaction translator. Each transaction translator segregates lower speed traffic into its own pool, essentially creating a virtual full-speed bus. Some designs use a single transaction translator, while other designs have multiple translators. Having multiple translators is a significant benefit when one connects multiple high-bandwidth full-speed devices.
It is an important consideration that in common language (and often product marketing) USB 2.0 is used as synonymous with high-speed. However, because the USB 2.0 specification, which introduced high-speed, incorporates the USB 1.1 specification such that a USB 2.0 device is not required to operate at high speed, any compliant full-speed or low-speed device may still be labelled as a USB 2.0 device. Thus, not all USB 2.0 hubs operate at high-speed.
Read more about this topic: USB Hub
Famous quotes containing the word speed:
“The terror of the atom age is not the violence of the new power but the speed of man’s adjustment to it—the speed of his acceptance.”
—E.B. (Elwyn Brooks)
“Among the laws controlling human societies there is one more precise and clearer, it seems to me, than all the others. If men are to remain civilized or to become civilized, the art of association must develop and improve among them at the same speed as equality of conditions spreads.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
“If it be aught toward the general good,
Set honor in one eye, and death i’th’ other,
And I will look on both indifferently;
For let the gods so speed me as I love
The name of honor more than I fear death.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)