Yeah, USB-C can do a lot more than USB-A, which is a blessing and a curse. The challenge with hubs is that they lead the user to believe that every port would have equal capabilities. That’s really tough with a USB-C shaped port. I agree that it’s very frustrating when all you want is more ports to each carry very little bandwidth (mouse, keyboard, etc.).
I have owned the OWC Thunderbolt hub that @Gem linked to, above, since it was released. It has three USB-C inputs. I hang a couple of USB-C external drives off of it, and an external monitor. The hub connects to my MacBook. It is a powered hub, and gets very warm / hot, so depending on the surface the user might want to use a cooling pad. It’s been reliable.
(OWC has a small menubar utility that users can install and use to eject drives connected to the hub – and only the hub. It ejects more reliably than Finder does.)
Might be easier for me just to replace my ancient USB trackball, which despite being a USB-A device would nonetheless free up a USB-C port, like a sliding-tiles game.
The Satechi is the first USB-C to USB-C hub I have seen, actually. For whatever reasons, there were never any of these around. I don’t know if that was a technical limitation of USB-C or not.
The Satechi you linked to appears to support data transfer of 5GBs, which indicates it is not USB-4 compliant (at least not fully). It also does not support video or power delivery, and but presumably would work for connecting a bunch of disk drives or other USB-C appliances.
The OWC hub is actually a TB4 hub (I have one) with a single USB-A port. It had not occurred to me to try connecting USB drives to it directly. It’s always a crapshoot with hubs and cables these days, since USB-C is actually a cable/connector specification (which can support USB, TB, and video on the same cable/connector) and the communications protocol (eg USB-3, USB-4, TB1/2/3/4) can be carried over any compatible cable / connector, of which USB-C is the only one at present.
Therefore, it is not a guarantee that any USB-C port can handle TB (some cannot) and I had not assumed that a TB4 hub could necessarily support USB on any of its ports. I have not connected a USB only device to one of the USB-C ports on the OWC hub (I have a 7 port USB hub connected to its USB-A port).
Worth mentioning that the OWC hub (not the dock, that provides 100W iirc) can only provide 60W of power. This is just about enough for a 15” MBP in most circumstances (you’ll occasionally see some battery drain under heavy load) but may well be problematic if you have a 16”.
