wraptors :
James Mason :
PCIE would be better for throughput.
It's still vastly faster than pure USB, so rather than splitting a single USB ports speeds, you can give 4 or so ports full speed through a PCIE adapter.
Thank you for your answer this is why I was leaning towards PCIE. I would rather have the hub if possible though. Do you think 3-4 drives would fully saturate the 5Gbps link?
Yes, possibly, it requires some math with numbers I don't have available at the moment.
There's a marketing trick going on here.
1 Gbps is 8 times smaller than 1 GBps.
b = bit, B = Byte.
Your hard drive shows MegaBytes
ISPs sell you MegaBits.
Bits are a larger number so they sell you that, but then your download speeds are always well, that number divided by 8.
If all 4 of hour HDDs are going to be sending their full 100MBs data transfer speeds through a single USB 3.0 cable at the same time, i'm somewhat doubtful you'll get that.