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OWC's Thunderbolt hub is the world's first docking station that can provide you with more Thunderbolt 3 or 4 ports than on the MacBook Pro, but it is not for everyone.
There are many docking stations on the market that can add more ports to the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, which usually have limited ports. In addition to providing more ports than Apple provides in its products, the docking station and hub also provide display and peripheral connections for the Mac host through a cable, and even provide a way to power the Mac.
The "normal" Thunderbolt docking station connects through one of the Mac's Thunderbolt ports and provides access to a large number of other types of ports, which Apple considers inappropriate to include in most of its portable product line. The focus of OWC Thunderbolt Dock is Thunderbolt. The front port is used for the Mac host, and the three ports on the other side are used for Thunderbolt to connect peripherals.
It's not all Thunderbolt, because there is only one USB-A 3.2 connection during the ride, as well as the mandatory power input port, Kensington Nano slot and LED indicator. All of these are housed in an aluminum and plastic enclosure that is 4.6 inches long, 2.9 inches wide, 0.7 inches thick, and weighs 7.3 ounces.
The top of the case will get a little hot during use, but this is not terrible. Using a non-contact thermometer, we saw a temperature of about 45 degrees Celsius in an environment of 20 degrees Celsius. Warm, but not hot to the touch. The OWC logo is a bit bright, but this can be solved with a little electrical tape.
To be honest, a lot of technical evaluation is not needed here. I tried OWC Thunderbolt hubs on various machines, including the 2016 MacBook Pro. All in all, as long as the machine is running Big Sur or newer, this simple box will provide you with three Thunderbolt 3 ports and one USB-A port instead of one Thunderbolt 3 or Thunderbolt 4 port.
Generally, Thunderbolt relies on a daisy chain, one device after another, which only occupies one Thunderbolt port on the Mac host. The problem with this situation is that if you disconnect the device in the middle of the chain, you will disconnect the chain of further devices, and these devices will remain disconnected until they rejoin the chain.
The OWC Thunderbolt hub overcomes this limitation by allowing the user to create a separate "tree branch" chain. In fact, you can remove it by disconnecting one of the three branches from the hub without affecting the device connected to one of the remaining two Thunderbolt ports.
Moreover, if you have Thunderbolt or USB-C peripherals, you can still daisy-chain downstream devices.
OWC also believes that this may be beneficial to users of multiple drives. In the usual chain, it is recommended that the drive be as close to the host as possible to maximize the amount of data it can access without being affected by other devices. At the same time, the use of bus-powered drives is restricted because you must place them at the end of the chain, and each chain is limited to one.
With a hub, this means that users can connect up to three bus-powered Thunderbolt drives at the same time, all connected to one port on the host.
The bandwidth of the entire link is still limited to 40 gigabits per second, and no device takes up more than 32 gigabits per second—but that’s good. If you do anything other than dual eGPU or data transfer between two NVMe-based SSDs, you won't actually encounter this situation often, if at all.
With Thunderbolt's ability to handle video, you can obviously connect a monitor to a Thunderbolt hub. Assuming that the host can handle it, it can support a single 8K or 5K display (up to 60Hz), one 4K display (120Hz) or two 4K displays (60Hz). We tested two 60Hz 4K monitors on 2018 Intel Mac mini and 16-inch M1 Max MacBook Pro, using USB-C to HDMI cable and USB-C to DisplayPort cable without any problems.
If your host device does not have Thunderbolt available, such as a PC with USB-C, you can still use a hub with it, but the maximum bandwidth through USB-C will be limited to 10Gb/s — this is fine, for Each port or even eight hard drive arrays is sufficient.
To ensure that it works perfectly with your Mac, OWC includes software such as OWC Dock Ejector, which safely disconnects multiple drives connected to the hub by ensuring that all data writing is completed in advance. The application also has a driver that provides rare support for Apple SuperDrive through the USB-A port of the hub.
You can supply power to the host device through the hub, which provides up to 60 watts of charging power. This is certainly sufficient for a 13-inch MacBook Pro or MacBook Air, or even older Intel models, but it seems not enough.
However, we hope it provides 87W of power to the host device to better support the larger MacBook Pro. In other words, it can drive 14-inch MacBook Pro with M1 Pro processor well, and under heavy load, the battery will slowly drain.
We do not recommend using it as a power source with the 16-inch MacBook Pro, just because the screen has additional power requirements. In the case of the new 16-inch MacBook Pro under a small load, the battery will charge, but the speed is very slow.
Under any meaningful load, the battery will consume about 3% per hour. It's better than nothing, but it's not the ideal you said.
My own use is as an ersatz Thunderbolt extender. My Mac mini server is located under the desktop, on top of the Thunderbolt RAID chassis, and is used for mass storage. We are using it to make the connection "upper layer".
Therefore, in this case, we prefer to connect the Thunderbolt host to the other side of the docking station instead of winding the power cord behind. This is not a big deal, and it may be good for most users, because USB-A stuff is usually a frequently swapped device, while Thunderbolt 3 stuff is a permanent plug.
For this use case, the 60W power limit is not a big problem. However, I also assume that people who expand like this may need more different ports.
At this point, you would think that I would be stuck in the Thunderbolt dock. The reality is that almost all of the content we reviewed was lent to us for review by the supplier and returned shortly thereafter.
Therefore, for our personal projects, such as my ongoing work on a Mac mini-based home server, we purchase our own equipment. Moreover, the OWC Thunderbolt hub is no exception.
OWC solved the problem of limited Thunderbolt ports on the first round of M1 Macs, and also gave users more choices in how to connect Thunderbolt hardware. For MacBook users who don't need a lot of power and want to provide power through a single-cable connection, the OWC Thunderbolt hub may be a viable solution.
For users of more powerful MacBook Pros, a slightly insufficient power supply may not be the best choice, and they need to add more power in other ways. But the additional Thunderbolt connection it provides still makes it attractive to the right users.
This is not for everyone. But for the few workflows that require multiple Thunderbolt ports in the downstream tree of a single port on the host, it is very suitable for this market segment.
The omnipotent Google needs a score, and it is difficult for this product to give a universal score. It is of little use to most people, and the retail price of $179 is best spent on USB 3.2 Type C docking stations or Thunderbolt docking stations with more traditional ports.
For those who only need a base and not a bunch of Thunderbolt, there is a better choice, which is a 2 out of 5 choice.
However, if you need more Thunderbolt, it is currently the only game in town that is actively shipping-but 60W is puzzling. This is not a consumer-centric product, and the “professional” market may need more power. For that market, this is four-fifths of the product, which is only hindered by a 60W power output.
As of press time, OWC Thunderbolt Hub can be purchased directly from OWC at a price of US$179.99. It appears regularly in their monthly garage sales, but there are fewer open boxes.
Inserting two sandisk ssd into the two tb ports on the m1 mini and using striped raid, I got a throughput of about 1500mb/s. When I use owc Dock, it drops to about 1000mb/s. When the mini is inserted, a single independent SSD with a clock of about 750mb/s drops to about 550mb/s. After I sent them a lot of test data and tried everything they suggested, owc basically disappointed me. They said the problem was with the monterey operating system. My first bad experience on owc, now I am stuck by the anchor. /Guy
Golftango said: Inserting two sandisk ssd into the two tb ports on the m1 mini and using striped raid, I got a throughput of about 1500mb/s. When I use owc Dock, it drops to about 1000mb/s. When the mini is inserted, a single independent SSD with a clock of about 750mb/s drops to about 550mb/s. After I sent them a lot of test data and tried everything they suggested, owc basically disappointed me. They said the problem was with the monterey operating system. My first bad experience on owc, now I am stuck by the anchor. /guy I haven't seen this problem. After the test, I also purchased a pair of NVMe-based drives. The drives read 2400 megabytes per second and write 2000 megabytes per second. When one is connected, I get 2400 drives, one reads one and the other One write is about 1500 megabytes per second. However, I have not done SSD RAID test. Which SanDisk drives? This does feel related to the RAID driver in Monterey, but I can’t say for sure, because apart from the lack of native support for RAID 5 in Big Sur on M1 instead of finding it on Intel, I’m not right. It is tested.
I did not see that problem. After the test, I also purchased a pair of NVMe-based drives. The drives read 2400 megabytes per second and write 2000 megabytes per second. When one is connected, I get 2400 drives, one reads one and the other One write is about 1500 megabytes per second. However, I have not done SSD RAID test. Which SanDisk drives? This does feel related to the RAID driver in Monterey, but I can’t say for sure, because apart from the lack of native support for RAID 5 in Big Sur on M1 instead of finding it on Intel, I’m not right. It is tested.
Golftango said: Inserting two sandisk ssd into the two tb ports on the m1 mini and using striped raid, I got a throughput of about 1500mb/s. When I use owc Dock, it drops to about 1000mb/s. When the mini is inserted, a single independent SSD with a clock of about 750mb/s drops to about 550mb/s. After I sent them a lot of test data and tried everything they suggested, owc basically disappointed me. They said the problem was with the monterey operating system. My first bad experience on owc, now I am stuck by the anchor. /guy Mac mini M1 misbehaves in some cases: if there is no display connected directly to the Thunderbolt port of the mini, the throughput to external devices via Thunderbolt is limited-as you described. I read about this issue on OWC's blog: The Rocket Yard.
The Mac mini M1 may behave incorrectly in some cases: if there is no display directly connected to the Thunderbolt port of the mini, the throughput to external devices through Thunderbolt is limited-as you described. I read about this issue on OWC's blog: The Rocket Yard.
The ones I got came with 110W power bricks. The large TB dock I got is equipped with a larger 135W dock. I just checked and the OWC website specifies these power bricks. The strange thing is that 60W power bricks appeared.
Rundhvid said: Golftango said: Insert two sandisk ssds into the two tb ports on the m1 mini and use striped raid, and I get a throughput of about 1500mb/s. When I use owc Dock, it drops to about 1000mb/s. When the mini is inserted, a single independent SSD with a clock of about 750mb/s drops to about 550mb/s. After I sent them a lot of test data and tried everything they suggested, owc basically disappointed me. They said the problem was with the monterey operating system. My first bad experience on owc, now I am stuck by the anchor. /guy Mac mini M1 misbehaves in some cases: if there is no display connected directly to the Thunderbolt port of the mini, the throughput to external devices via Thunderbolt is limited-as you described. I read about this issue on OWC's blog: The Rocket Yard. I have Mac Mini M1, owc Thunderbolt case and SSD. I use HDMI video. If I connect my oldest 4k BenQ EL2870U (28", 3840 x 2160 pixels), the disk speed is 1.8gb/s. If I connect the newer Samsung U32R594CWR (32", 4K UHD), the speed is still 3.5gb/s The reason why this happens is a mystery to me...
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OWC's Thunderbolt hub is the world's first docking station that can provide you with more Thunderbolt 3 or 4 ports than on the MacBook Pro, but it is not for everyone.