Tried a USB-C hub from a dollar store, fried three flash drives

Honestly I grabbed a $12 hub off a shelf in a dollar store in Toledo last Tuesday just to test a few drives on a bench rig. Plugged in my Sandisk 64GB and a Kingston, both dead within 5 minutes with a burnt smell. Learned real quick that power delivery chips in cheap hubs are garbage, now I only use Anker or StarTech for any data recovery work. Anyone else had a budget accessory kill their hardware or did I just get the one bad batch?

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patricianguyen22d ago

...and yeah that totally sounds like the same thing that happened to me. I bought a no name brand hub from a clearance bin at a CVS once, plugged in an old external drive just to pull some photos off it, and the drive started clicking and then just died. The smell is what got me too, that hot plastic and burnt circuit smell. I think these cheap hubs skip basic voltage regulation, so they just dump whatever power they get straight into your devices. Now I'm paranoid and always check the specs before I plug anything important into a hub, even the decent ones.