USB 3.1 hub vs USB PCIE for multiples hard drives in use

[wraptors]

Trying to find the best solution for adding more USB 3.0 ports. I have 4 external drives that will be used. They will often be used at the same time so my concern is about bandwidth. I have a USB 3.1gII port on my MB. If I buy something like this https://goo.gl/99Q8Av would the 4 drives get full speed all being used at once? Or am I just better off getting a USB 3.0 PCIE? Any other solutions?

 

[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.

 

[wraptors]

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?

 

[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.