“Great speeds and being able to power the hub directly. Comes with a U-shaped usb adapter to easily connect it when it sits on top of the pi, and a usb 3 A-to-A connector (you're going to have to give up a usb 3 port on the pi either way). It is basically a powered usb hub with gpio pass through though, and I can't seem to find a purpose-made case for it, so if you want a clean setup and don't want to mount the HAT on top, consider a different usb hub option.”
“So far, no complaints. It works exactly as I hoped it would. The USB HAT has its own USB C power socket but it isn't clear from the description whether this can power the attached Pi as well as the HAT. Having a USB hub as a HAT doesn't make a lot of sense if you have to provide it with a separate power supply. For low-power devices, the Pi will power the HAT, but that's no good if you want to power a hard drive.
It turns out, after a conversation with Waveshare technical support, that the HAT can't power the Pi as supplied. However, it's easy to make it do so, by bridging two pads on the PCB. Of course, you need some modest soldering skill to do this. With this done, I can power the HAT and the Pi from the same USB C supply.
This is a convenient way to connect high-ish power hard drives to a Pi, without any additional wiring.
i haven't had the device for very long but, so far, it has been completely reliable.”
“I'm using this with a Raspberry Pi 2 B and the supplied USB connector. A separately purchased USB splitter (to Micro USB for the Pi, and USB-C for the hat) powers both from a single supply. I can connect 2.5" HDD, DVD writer, and WiFi dongle to the HAT for use with LibreElec as a Kodi media center.”
“This is a very handy board providing extra USB ports for the Pi. I use this to connect a couple of SSDs where the ability to power the board separately from the PI is needed.
It worked out of the box with no issues so far.
The design connects it to the Pi with a header but this isn't used by the board and is just for mounting to the Pi but I instead have mine away from the Pi with the SSDs. This means it should also work with other computers.”
