Hyper HyperDrive Flex 8 Port USB-C Hub Review: Distracting but Fun

The Hyper HyperDrive Flex 8-Port USB-C hub is a well-designed hub with fast speeds and textured plastics that is comfortable to hold, an investment you’ll be happy to keep in your desk or everyday carry—but it isn’t without its foibles.

Price and Availability

The Hyper HyperDrive Flex 8-Port USB-C hub is most readily available in a combination of white and blue. An alternate black version is shown as “coming soon” on the Hyper website.

The hub is available online from Hyper and Best Buy for $45. The latter also carries the product in stores.

Can a USB-C Hub Be Fun?

That’s the question posed by the design of the Hyper HyperDrive Flex. While most USB-C hubs of its type are made of smooth plastics, this one has a texture to it that’s pleasant to run your fingers across. It’s not soft-touch plastic like you find on some phones and game controllers, but it’s a step in that direction. At 80g, the hub has a degree of weight that feels satisfying when you take it out of the box, but not so much that you’ll notice its presence in the pocket of your bag.

The HyperDrive Flex has a white outer layer that dominates three sides, including both the top and bottom of the unit. There’s a blue layer that dominates the other three, most noticeable in the top corner around the logo and along the left side. The Hyper logo, which looks like a modified H, lights up when you plug in the hub and flashes when transfers are underway.

The light is a cool touch, but it can be distracting if you’re working in a dark or dim space, as I often am. I’m writing this part of the draft in the wee hours of the morning, with the light from the hub shining into the corner of my eye.

On the flip side, this design makes this hub easier to spot in a drawer filled with cables, and you may be less likely to accidentally leave it lying around out in public. As much as I prefer subdued and subtle, there is a certain value to a design that’s loud.

Most of the Ports You’ll Ever Need

The HyperDrive Flex comes with eight ports spread across three sides. This matters quite a bit, since the layout of ports can shape how you use the hub. I have a hub from UPerfect that places almost all the ports on the same side. This can angle all the wires toward the back of a table if used with something like one of UPerfect’s lapdocks, but it also means thick plugs might prevent other cables from having the space to plug in.

By comparison, Hyper gives each port ample room. On one side, there’s a USB-C port and two USB-A ports for transferring data, all promising 5Gbps speed. They’re joined by an HDMI port for connecting your device to an external monitor or a TV. This hub supports a 4K resolution at 30Hz via an HDMI port. The specification is HDMI 1.4.

On the opposite side, we get a second USB-C port. This one delivers power at up to 100W. By its side, you’ll also find a headphone jack that supports audio coming both in and out, in case you want to plug in a headset with a microphone.

On the short, far end of the hub, there are two dedicated slots for both a full-sized and a microSD card.

The hub connects to your device via a USB-C port. This makes it suitable for most modern laptops, including MacBooks. It also works with tablets and phones, which is my primary use case. Hubs like this are how I connect my Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 to external monitors for Samsung DeX or get files off a camera’s SD card, as I did for all the photos I took of this hub. Those photos transferred in mere seconds, by the way.

While I can plug USB-C flash drives and external SSDs directly into my phone, this hub still comes in handy, since it opens up the option to transfer data directly from one external storage device to another.

Where the Hub Could Be Better

To test the HDMI port, I connected my phone to an external 4K monitor and worked via Samsung DeX. DeX supports up to 60Hz, so the hub wasn’t reaching the maximum refresh rate due to its own limit of 30Hz at 4K. Yet 30Hz is still usable for office work, and it’s more than enough to stream video. But if you’re investing in this hub as a gamer looking to connect your laptop, phone, or gaming handheld to a 4K display, this isn’t the best option, despite what its name and appearance might suggest.

With the ports spread across three sides, some of the space just looks wasted. At least I feel that way when I reflect on how one port that I often need a hub for is completely missing: Ethernet. Even before I switched to my phone as my main PC, it had been quite a while since I last owned a computer that came with an Ethernet port.

USB-C hubs with Ethernet come in handy when I need to deal with networking issues. While it’s hard to call the absence of Ethernet a flaw, it’s the sort of thing that would lead me to pass on this hub personally, since it’s not hard to find a similarly sized hub that will enable me to plug my devices into a router.

Should You Buy the Hyper HyperDrive Flex 8-Port USB-C Hub?

This depends on your usage and your work setting. Hyper’s white and blue hub stands out, for better or worse, and may not be the look you want connecting a black laptop to a black monitor. The always-on light is a nice touch if you’re only using the hub for quick file transfers, but it can be distracting if you’re looking for a hub that you will primarily use to connect your device to an external display. These are subjective issues, but both would give me pause.

On the other hand, as a tool that primarily resides in a desk drawer or in a bag for short bursts of use, the Hyper HyperDrive Flex is great! Its design is fun, the build-quality is pleasant to hold, and the performance delivers. I’d continue to turn to my upright phone dock for connecting my phone to a monitor, but I would be happy to keep this around for most everything else—if only it had just one more port.