Adding USB ports

[On Error Try Again]

My PC has three USB ports. Is it possible to add more?

[passel]

Plug a USB hub into one of the ports?
If you have I/O slots, plug in a multiport USB card?

Just buying a hub and plugging it in a port would be the typical way to expand the number of ports, as that was part of the USB design from day one.

[dilettante]

Your "3 ports" might be one adapter with a 3-port hub already, though in some machines they tend to use one adapter and a hub for 2 ports and a second adapter for the 3rd. That gives you one port with higher bandwidth, the other two being used for things like a keyboard and mouse.

There is no magic: every time you add a hub to the chain you split up the bandwidth and add a little delay. Not a problem unless you want to plug in high bandwidth low latency devices like HDDs and fast flash memory drives.

Adding a card means you add one or more additional USB adapters, but these are downstream of the PCI, etc. bus so they can't quite achieve the performance a native motherboard adapter can. However these are still good for USB 3.0, they may just suffer a bit from some bus contention.


Depending on your motherboard there might be unpopulated headers for an adapter/hub that is already integrated but unused. You just need to get the cable/slot-bracket with the USB sockets and install it properly. Those are not highly standardized so you will need to carefully examine your motherboard docs and the specs of various brackets before buying.

See https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q...acket&tbm=shop for example.