Intro to Pc

Farhad Ferdaus        

Unit 4 Research Paper

Port Expanders

        A port expander is a hardware device designed to allow more than one connection to a single port. For example if you only have 1 USB port and you had a USB Mouse and Keyboard, you can use a USB Port expander to connect to the USB port and have the USB Mouse and Keyboard connect to the port expander.

        The different types of port expanders are as followed;

1. SCSI Port Expander Hardware
2. Audio Port Expander Hardware
3. VGA Port Expander Hardware
4. RS-422 Port Expander Hardware
5. SATA Port Expander Hardware
6. Ethernet Port Expander Hardware
7. Modbus Serial Port Expander Hardware
8. SSD Port Expander Hardware
9. SAS Port Expander Hardware
10. DB-25 Port Expander Hardware
11. USB Port Expander Hardware
12. Microphone Port Expander Hardware
13. FireWire Port Expander Hardware
14. Serial Port Expander Hardware
15. Video Port Expander Hardware
16. DVI Port Expander Hardware

Port Expanders are made to be generic devices that will work with any computer. The advantages to using a port expander are it allows you to connect multiple devices to a single port. The disadvantages to a port expander are the speed of the port is divided up among the devices connected to the port expander. A port expander connected to a 3 GBps port with 8 devices connected to the port expander will give a maximum of 375 MBps connection to each device.