StarTech brings back what Ultrabook makers left out.
For those that can afford Ultrabooks they're great, right up till you realise to make a system that thin and powerful, some parts were intentionally left out. Optical disks were annexed a while back, and these days' even USB and LAN ports are being banished in an attempt to be ever thinner and lighter.
The ST3300GU3B by StarTech aims to add back both a selection of USB 3.0 ports and a LAN port back, all packaged in a neat aluminium cased accessory. All this is done with portability in mind, I presume, as the adapter is just 87mm long, 40mm wide and 12mm high (excluding the short integrated USB cable). Alongside this in the packaging are a driver CD, multi-regional power supply, and some basic instructions.
The inclusion of the power supply concerned me greatly, because, if it was required to get this ports working, then it suddenly seemed a much less slick solution. Thankfully I soon discovered that you don't need the PSU unless you intend to power external hard drives through the ST3300GU3B, which seems entirely reasonable.
Installation on Windows isn't automatic, so Ultrabook owners will need either to find a USB connected optical drive to use the disk or download the drivers direct from StarTech. Maybe putting the drivers on a cheap 2GB USB stick might have been a smarter plan?
Once these are installed a single USB 3.0 port on the laptop can be turned into three, and a physical gigabit LAN port. There's a realistic balance to be struck in doing that, because plugging this into a PC doesn't triple the available bandwidth for USB 3.0 and add more for the fast LAN port. It's a single USB port divided up four ways, if you try to use them all fully. However, in use the performance was generally acceptable for client devices that don't use every scrap of bandwidth, and the LAN port is typically quicker and more consistent than wi-fi. It's most useful with low power peripherals like Mice and Keyboards, but works well with USB 3.0 Flash modules and 3G dongles.
Unfortunately it does have one major flaw: the three USB ports are all on one side, separated by just 5mm. That's far too close, so near I couldn't even put USB keys in adjacent ports. Why they didn't put two on one side and one on the other is a mystery. The chosen layout practically reduces the port selection to just two, making the device proportionally less useful.
That ergonomic muck-up is the critical mistake in the ST3300GU3B, and had StarTech not made it, I'd be strongly recommending this even at what seems a mildly expensive cost. I do hope StarTech revamps this design with some better port spacing, because for the average Ultrabook user, this is probably the single practical accessory they'll ever need. Mark Pickavance
Adds a gigabit LAN and three USB 3.0 ports.