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Warning: Your USB extension cable can quietly trash your data speeds, I found out from a spec sheet
I was cleaning up the nest behind my desk on Saturday and grabbed a 10 foot USB extension cable off Amazon for 9 bucks to reach my keyboard, and everything felt fine for about a week. Then my external drive backups started crawling, like 40 minutes for stuff that used to take 6. I blamed the drive, then the port, then Windows, and finally pulled up the spec sheet for the cable. Turns out anything past 3 feet on a plain USB 2.0 extension drops you to a slower tier, and a lot of the cheap ones are not even built to the spec they claim. I ran a free speed test on the drive direct vs through the extension and the difference was almost 4x. So now the long cable only feeds my mouse, and anything that moves files gets a short cable straight into the tower. Has anyone found a long extension that actually holds full speed, or is the move just to run a powered hub instead?
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