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Cambrionix Brings the Thunder with the Baddest USB Hub Out There

The Universal Serial Bus (USB) is living up to its name, as more and more devices over the last decade have adopted it as the primary method to charge and transfer data.  Nowadays the number of devices that you need to charge or move data across is huge and trying to charge devices one at a time would take forever.In the past USB hubs filled this role where you could plug in usually only 4 devices at the same time and everything was bottlenecked by a single USB connection upstream to the computer.  Also, many traditional USB hubs only supported up to 7.5 watts (5 volts @ 1.5 amps) of charging per port which is not enough to quickly charge a lot of mobile devices out there.

In response to this, Cambrionix, a UK company that specializes in the charging and connectivity of mobile devices, has introduced the ultimate USB hub- the ThunderSync16.  Instead of being bottlenecked by a single USB 3.1 Gen 1 (5 Gb/s) connection found on many USB hubs upstream to the computer, the ThunderSync16 uses a fast Thunderbolt 2 (20 Gb/s) connection to a PC or Mac supporting Thunderbolt 2.  There is also another Thunderbolt 2 connector that can be used for daisy chaining other ThunderSync16's or other Thunderbolt peripherals.

Each ThunderSync16 unit supports 16 USB 2.0 ports which is good enough for most smartphones and tablets which only support USB 2.0 anyway.  More importantly, each USB port supports 12 watts (5 volts @ 2.4 amps) which allows you to charge your mobile devices faster.

Once plugged into a PC or Mac, the ThunderSync16 creates an additional 16 USB ports that the user can access from the PC or Mac.

Compared to using conventional USB 2.0 hubs, in this video Cambrionix shows how the ThunderSync16 uses Thunderbolt to achieve over 10X transfer speeds compared to using USB.

We plugged in different groups of 16 USB devices (smartphones, tablets, storage, fitness wearables, etc.) into the ThunderSync16 and confirmed that all 16 devices enumerated correctly in the Mac and all devices with a battery were being charged.

More reviews showing other use cases of the Cambrionix ThunderSync16 to come.