• bizarroland@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    43
    ·
    1 day ago

    That’s a Lenovo E480. There are two other USB-A and a USB-C and HDMI on the other side, plus you can’t see behind the dongles but there’s an ethernet port on the laptop as well.

    I only have two complaints with what I’m looking at. One is there’s probably not enough power for whatever you have connected to all of those USB things. And two, there’s not enough support for the port that you’re plugging this into to resist the weight of all of the dongles, which could damage the motherboard.

    • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      12 hours ago

      Depends. Modern keyboards, mice and controllers use just a few milliamps and the laptop must be able to supply 500 mA. However, just about anything that charges will use the whole 500 mA or even try to negotiate more. There are even non-compliant devices like heating pads that draw 2 A without asking.

    • azimir@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      1 day ago

      What if they’re external drives with their own power supplies? I’ve done things nearly this convoluted, but used self powered devices.

        • azimir@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          18 hours ago

          I’m quite familiar with that one.

          The worst one was the pre Raspberry Pi 3 boards. The early ones used an on board Ethernet chip set that was slaved directly to the USB controller. It was USB 2.0 so it could negotiate 100, but really run much less than that.

          Then, if you put in a keyboard, mouse, and a USB thumb drive the USB host would multiplex over them and your bandwidth for data transfer would drop precipitously.

          I was so happy when they moved to a real Ethernet chip instead of a USB adapter. The new limitation became the microSD… Of course they also introduced the grounding reset issue on the USB port, but just don’t plus or unplug anything and it’d be fine.