Will this enable two or three PCs to connect to the same USB peripherals?

Question

I am thinking that if I get a 12- or 16- port USB hub, I can connect two or three different PCs via USB to the hub, then connect out from the hub to three or four USB peripherals and each PC will be able to use all the peripherals (a printer, external hdd, and recording device), am I right? Will I need to plug only one USB cable from each PC into the hub or one for each peripheral, meaning three per PC if there are three peripherals? Any other problems to solve to make this work?

Answer 1

The class of USB devices you are looking for is called "USB sharing hub". You can't get the needed functionality out of regular USB hubs, they have only one port that goes into PC host. The sharing hubs have two (or maybe more) upstream ports. Here is an example of a product with peripheral sharing functionality.

Answer 2

This won't work, USB is designed to connect a single host to multiple devices, not to connect multiple hosts to multiple devices.

For the printer and hard drive the best option is probably to connect them to one machine and use some form of network sharing to share them to the others. For the "recording device" I don't know what your options are.

You can get USB switch boxes but you will have to switch them between computers manually and using them with storage devices is probably a bad idea due to the risk of accidental data corruption.