R. McCarty said:
Each "Physical" Port ( Socket ) works through a transceiver that
has interconnections between the Enhanced Controller and the
standard controllers. So all USB 2 devices will show up in the
"Advanced" (TAB) of the Enhanced Controller. Any USB1/1.1
Devices will appear in the Host Controller properties.
So you can't really map USB2.0 devices to a physical port, they
all route to the same Host Controller.
But you can do that by using USB1 (Full Speed) devices since
they'll appear on their respective Host Controllers Advanced
details box.
My Intel 865 motherboard has 8 Ports and in Device Manager
I've got 1 Enhanced and 4 Low speed Controllers.
A little bit confusing, isn't it
Somewhat, but manageable. The USB2/EHCI part is simple enough. What
complicates things a bit is that there are multiple "logical" ports
associated with each controller. As you point out, you have 8 physical
ports but only 4+1 controllers. I think, though I haven't actually
counted, that the total number of ports showing under all controllers
exceeds the number of physical ports I have, so what's the
relationship?
This subject is related to my feeble attempt to distribute the activity
of my USB devices across ports (as shown in Device Manager). I have a
USB2 TV tuner, whose power requirements exceed the single port "limit"
of 500ma (it is in fact supplied with a second USB connection just to
obtain the additional power, though I don't need to use it on my
laptop), plus a USB2 DVD drive, plus a USB2 HDD and occasionally a
second HDD. All these together surely exceed the 500ma that a USB2 port
is expected to supply, and yet it works, without even using the second
connection on my tuner. SO I can't help but wonder what the 500ma
figure actually Apart from the power issues, I was thinking that it
would be a good idea for more ports to get a piece of the action simply
for reasons of reduced contention. I have no idea how to manage this.