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Which ThunderBolt 4 HUB for Mac Mini M1?
As far as I understood, there are "Docks" and "Hubs".
The Hubs allow to extend the PCI busses and are to be preferred.
But which one really do perform well?
There are numerous YT videos about this, and as it seems the "Element Hub" from CalDigit is one of the best.
http://shop.caldigit.com/eu/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=211
https://www.caldigit.com/thunderbolt-4-element-hub/
Sadly, this thing cannot be bought currently.
Alternatives are from Anker and OWC, as it seems.
Some brands seem to have triggered death for MacBooks, when powered through them (even if Apple seems to have fixed this)
But what are YOU using?
Any other recommendation or experience with the above devices?
Comments
Ive had quite a few docks in my time. Caldigit works as advertised. Used the owc ones too...great stuff, waiting for their v4 to come out.
Just bought the wife a glyph thunderdock so she can stop pestering me to back up her laptop. Perfect for her, but I need more ports.
You you can just go all in....
Wow, that's impressive 😳
I found this xMac, for about $1000.... but it may not work for the next Mini, as Apple changes the format.
I just learned that the Anker PowerExpand 5-in-1 or Anker Apex 12-in-1 do NOT support M1.
That just leaves the OWC Thunderbolt 4 Docking Station as last option, as CalDigit is not available.
https://www.owcdigital.com/products/thunderbolt-dock
Sadly, from https://www.owcshop.eu/catalog/product_info.php/thunderbolt-dock-p-2006 it also cannot currently be bought.
There is some version 4 coming? What is new or different in this?
I could not find information...
Thanks a bunch!
I meant to say the thunderbolt 3 dock (not 4) from OWC, it just recently came available. Looked last week and they were still preorder. I can add one to a cart now.
I can also say my 1st gen from them also worked wih an m1 (thunderbolt 1 speeds w/ adapter).
The rack has no drivers. Will work forever. Only matters what drivers work for the pcie cards.
I can find them for about 700us, but still pricey, but cant complain when you can throw cards on a mini (looking at you UAD). The older racks w/ TB1 and 2 only had drivers for the gigabit ethernet cards in them.
The OWC stuff has never let me down, and id recommend it over the caldigit. Or over anything really with the amt of ports it has. They sit on my desk and my minis are racked and away (with their cheaper soultion which is just an enclosure for 2 minis)
We may have some misunderstanding here, @AlmostAnonymous
The product mentioned above is a Thunderbolt 4 device, not Thundervbolt 3.
Even the product number mentions that: OWCTB4DOCK
There are older Thunderbolt 3 devices from 2018 to 2020, but the one that was on preorder and can be ordered now, is not Thunderbolt 3.
I am referring to this one,
https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/owc-thunderbolt-dock
Edit: its late...the above one is the preorder one.
I miss FireWire 400
Yes, that's the Thunderbolt 4 version.
I did order it now.
Sorry for all the confusion. They're solid. You won't be disappointed.
Does it support the iPad Pro M1 2021?
It seems to be very similar to the Sonnet Echo 11 Thunderbolt 4 Dock. Which one is the original?
https://www.sonnettech.com/product/echo11-thunderbolt4-dock/overview.html
Yes, as written above.
Ive used both owc and sonnet stuff. Theyre both the the same. Sonnet tends to have a slightly larger price tag on it.
The OWC Dock already arrived ..
I need to make space and find a way for all the cables now :-D
It seems to be planned, that I connect the Mac by the ThunderBolt port at the "front" ... the one that delivers power.
Hopefully, that is not a problem for the Mac, as it does not need this.
I did not yet try to connect the Mac to one of the 3 ports on the "back" ...
That "back" looks to me like a better front anyways :-D
I tried Blackmagic Disk Speed Test on my T7 Touch 1TB:
Directly connected to the Mac USB-C: about 658 MB/s both read and write.
As I read that things get faster with a Hub, the following is massively disappointing:
Connected to the OWC Hub: about 530 MB/s and 512 MB/s write
The SSD is rated for about 1000 MB/S and could reach over 900 MB/s here:
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-t7-touch-portable-ssd/2
So, this Hub is not as good as I thought and I am really not sure about sending it back.
The Mac's internal disk reached 2852 MB/s read and 2860 MB/s write.
The product page at https://www.owcshop.eu/catalog/product_info.php/thunderbolt-dock-p-2006 still mentions "Estimated shipping on 15/08/2021."
Maybe they sent me an older device?!?
I contacted OWC about this ...
OWC is aware of the issue, but do not have a solution (yet).
I am going to not send the device back.
This is partly, because my USB Hub, that I now connected to the Thunderbolt Dock does NOT loose connectivity to keyboard and mouse anymore, after a sleep or a lock-screen!
So, my daily situation got much better.
Only one of my monitors still shows the same behavior and does not come back after a sleep.
Massively annoying.
In this case, I need to unplug the USB-C-to-DisplayPort cable at the Mac - it does not suffice to unplug at the monitor.
Again annoying.
And I cannot even open a case at Apple.
They only allow you to give "feedback" without any reply.
OK...you got a lot going on here...so lemme try and answer these
Correct, i see that as well.
Post a pic of the dock.
Not sure where you read that, but a dock/hub won't accelerate a data transfer
This is about what I get with my t7. This is also on a thunderbolt 2 dock with usb3.1gen1 ports
Sometimes i get more, sometimes a bit less. USB fluctuates a lot where as thunderbolt tends to run at the top of its bandwidth.
This is due to software controllers (USB) vs hardware controllers (TB).
There are theroretical maximums. Never a real wolrd case. Only times I get over 1000mb is when i start using SSD raids.
They are all like this really. The caldigit was no faster or slower than the OWC one. My glyph is no faster or slower either (except for the built in NVME). I use the OWCs because it has the most ports for expansion by far for the same or less loot. I never had a problem with any of them thus my previous recommendation a few days ago.
To be expected for SoC, no usb bus, etc. Even NVME drives rated at 3000mb a sec, i've never achieved read/writes of 2000mb from my mini or air (again, unless im using RAIDs)
Not sure i can help here as I am a 1 monitor guy. But how are these display connected? 1 to the mac and 1 to the dock?
And the one on the mac doesn't come on, but the one on the dock does? If so, try connecting both to the dock?
There is a displaylink driver for docks that support it. I've found even installing this driver alone has helped with m1 dual displays even if the dock doesn't support displaylink. Maybe i'm just giving myself the Jedi Mind Trick, not sure.
Its just the manual web version of "Send Report to Apple" for crashes
Overall (with the exception of the display issue) you seem to be experiencing what you should in real world (not theoretical maximums).
I'd need to know more about your endgame and can provide more info.
If you got a mini with a smaller drive and were looking to use an external to boot from, or host 99% of your content, this doesn't work well. The memory swaps wont work at the mini's 2000mb/s speeds. (if this is what you were looking to do...i was and have tried. worked well for daily driving, but not large logic projects).
Docks are convenience, not necessarily a performance expansion. There is a bottleneck going from TB to USB (and you have added a hop in there). Thunderbolt 1 vs tb 2/3/4... i cant even saturate a TB1 connection, and externals dont perform any faster on a tb3 dock than a tb1. They're only as fast as their interface.
That being said...spending 100's of dollars more on faster enclosures and drives to gain 1-3 seconds of my life back in speed....that loot was better spend on other things imho.
And being audio files are most small files that lose the benefits of sustained read/write speeds of large files...
(hope there was something helpful in all that keyboard smashing i did)
Another thing I just thought of, are you using a thunderbolt cable (in the box) to connect the mini to the dock, and not a usb-c cable? I know the TB cables they come with are mad short.
Thanks for the reply @AlmostAnonymous
I got an answer from OWC, the performance is a known issue and they say that only Apple can fix this.
I do not plan to send the device back anymore.
There are many reviews / YT videos, where an external drive was faster when using a Thunderbolt dock, as compared to directly connected to the Mac! At least, it should not be slower, as it is.
I used the USB-C cable that came with the dock and the USB-C cables that came with my Samsung T7 Touch and T5.
But the devices will be shown as USB devices in the system report, but this seems to be normal.
The performance numbers I posted about the internal disks where my real numbers from BlackMagic Disk Speed Test!
I have the 512 GB / 16 GB version of the Mac Mini M1.
One monitor is connected via HDMI cable, the other via USB-C-to-DisplayPort cable, both directly to the Mac.
The dock should have come with a TB cable, not usb-c. My docks show up under TB bus in system profile, not USB. The performance difference is huge, so you may wanna try a TB cable. I'd also try connecting the 2nd display to the dock, the usbc one. I bet it will wake up with the computer from sleep.
I never shut my computers down. Sorry Earth. My display turns off after 10min instead of a screensaver, but it always wakes up. Dock connected, not mac connected. TB to DisplayPort adapter.
As I said, I used the USB-C cable that came with the dock.
And with USB-C, I meant the physical port, not the protocol used over the cable.
Still, the cables may play a role here ...
Also, I meant the connected SSD devices that show up in the USB tree, not the Thunderbolt tree - but this seems to be normal and you should see the same!
And no, I am not going to connect any monitor to the dock. I did not buy the Thunderbolt dock to also run a monitor over it.
In this case, one of the two USB-C ports of the Mac would totally be unused and the second monitor would eat performance from the SSD devices.
I already hate that I needed to connect the USB Hub to the dock ... I will not do the same for a monitor! :-D
Thanks a bunch
What I was asking is if the dock itself shows up under the USB tree or the TB tree.
Just make sure its a tb cable. I'm getting confused because you cant use usb-c and tb in dialog in terms of a connector. Same connector, completely different cables (which you are aware). I deal with this all day with end users:
I put a TB DAS on that "unused" port. Get you a little better speed than going through the dock bus. No sense in dedicating 40gb/sec to a single display.
The dock is in the Thunderbolt tree, I was only ever talking about the connected devices.
I only know USB-C cables which connect to USB-C ports.
Thunderbolt, which is a different protocol, originally used the MiniDisplayPort port, but later also used the USB-C port.
The Mac offers two Thunderbolt 2 and 3 compatible USB-C ports, that are also compatible to USB4, USB 3.1, HDMI, DVI and DisplayPort. But the port is USB-C. I cannot look into the cables to see if they truely are USB-C or Thunderbolt. I just hope that OWC and Samsung deliver the right cables :-) As the dock is called "Thunderbolt dock", I just assumed that the cable is right.
As I wrote, most reviews mention that an SSD is faster when used over a dock!
But currently, this is not true for the OWC dock.
So maybe I will try a different setup ...but generally, I would prefer to connect "important" things to the 2 ports in the Mac: A dock and a monitor. Both are more essential than an external disk, of course - and should better be connected to the dock.
Both monitor and dock are always reqiuired, external disks only sometimes.
I got two links from OWC, but they evolve around a general performance problem of the M1 Mac ports, not the even worse performance of the Thunderbolt dock:
https://eshop.macsales.com/blog/74383-faster-drive-performance-with-m1-mac/
https://eshop.macsales.com/blog/74780-faster-external-drive-speed-m1-mac/
It seems, that one port get's faster, when the other has a Thunderbolt monitor connected.
While I have not ThunderBolt display, I now changed my cabling like this:
Thunderbolt Bus 0: Samsung T7 Touch 1TB
Thunderbolt Bus 1: Thunderbolt Dock
HDMI: Primary monitor
And on the Thunderbolt dock, I connected both the second monitor (USB-C-to-DisplayPort) and the Samsung T5 1TB for Time Machine.
I tested the T7 again:
688 MB/s read
655 MB/s write