This $35 board brings 10 more USB ports to a Raspberry Pi 5

The Raspberry Pi 5 is a credit card-sized computer with a quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 processor and up to 16GB of RAM. It also has plenty of I/O capabilities thanks to support for WiFi, Bluetooth, Gigabit Ethernet, two micro HDMI ports, and four USB Type-A ports.

But what if you need more USB ports? That’s where the X1013 10-port USB Hub add-on board comes in. Available from AliExpress or The Pi Hut for $35 and up, the board lives up to its name by providing 10 additional USB ports, effectively turning a Raspberry Pi 5 into a tiny PC with 14 total USB Type-A ports.

The X1013 is a 107.8 x 85mm (4.24″ x 3.35″) board that’s only compatible with the Raspberry Pi 5 and not earlier models because it uses an FPC connector to establish a PCIe connection with the single-board computer. There are also pogo pins that can send power to the Raspberry Pi, allowing you to power both the computer and add-on board using a 9-18V DC power adapter. The board also has its own power button, allowing you to turn the Raspberry Pi & add-on board on and off with a single button press.

The board itself features four USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports and six USB 2.0 Type-A ports. Since the Raspberry Pi 5 itself has two of each, that means that once connected you get a total of:

• 6 x USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A (up to 5 Gbps)
• 8 x USB USB 2.0 Type-A (up to 480 Mbps)

But as CNX Software points out, since the X1013 uses a single lane of PCIe 2.0 to communicate with the Raspberry Pi, it’s probably impossible to get top speeds from all of those ports at the same time. If you have a bunch of high-speed accessories connected at once it’s likely that you’ll see some throttling.

But if you just want to be able to plug in a lot of peripherals and keep the plugged in without the need to swap cables every time you want to switch mice, printers, keyboards, flash drives, etc, then I suppose it’s nice to have an affordable way to do that?