I have an OWC Thunderbolt hub with my M1 Mini, and it seems to work just fine. OWC products aren’t generally the cheapest, but they’re consistently quality in my experience.
Well, the power damage issue was USB C, not Thunderbolt, so you should be safe!
I bought the CalDigit TS3+ and have been using it a few days now. Pretty solid! The power supply is quiet, thank goodness, though still a bit large. Performance is fast, everything I hook up to it runs at full speed, my 4K display is 60 Hz no bother, and I’m already enjoying the first line-in socket I’ve had with a Mac since my 12 inch PowerBook G4! Sampling D1 Synth on the iPad while using Logic is a world of fun; especially compared to doing it in GarageBand on the tablet! So I’m fairly pleased so far.
My early niggles are that, again, the CalDigit runs hot, hotter than my Air’s own power supply, as Thunderbolt hub chipsets just seem to be quite power hungry on their own. My ears are sharp enough to hear when it does sometimes emit some switched mode power noise, but nothing like as loud or as permanent as the Brydge I tried in December. Oh, and the SD slot though very handy and fast does have the habit of needing physically ejected and re-inserted when I want to access the same card when re-docking my MacBook. It’s still not quite as nice as a built in SD slot, but that’s on Apple!
Anyway, I’m keeping this thing. It even tucks away nicely under my desk. Thunderbolt was made for pluggable hubs like this.
I too had to replace the logic board on my MacBook pro M1. I had an Aukey usb hub powered with PD. I unplugged the power and the mac started rebooting by itself, until it died. The technicians suggested to power the laptop only with the original cable directly, without hub or dock, but - since I use it almost always connected with an external monitor - how is it possible to use only one single usb-c / thunderbolt ???
The alternatives I see are either caldigit, owc or startech mini hubs (they are identical as ports and do not include power passthrough), or a Caldigit TS3 or the newest thunderbolt 4 docks by Caldigit and OWC.
However, I’m not comfortable using a powered dock. I wonder if it could be possible to connect the TS3 not to the monitor and the monitor via usb and displayport to the laptop: in this way the laptop would not be powered directly but I don’t know if it is possible by this or any other product.
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Hmm. I don’t know. The CalDigit TS3+ is, at the end of the day, a Thunderbolt hub. I’m not sure how well it would behave if you plugged a USB hub into its Thunderbolt host socket. It sounds like it could work, but maybe not. Certainly, you’d be limited to USB speed, losing a lot of the TS3’s capabilities due to greatly reduced bandwidth. And because you’d need a separate power connection, you’re already out of ports on your Mac to route around this bottleneck.
For what it’s worth, my M1 Air and DS3+ are getting along just fine, and I haven’t heard of anyone toasting their Mac with one of these. Seems to have been a USB hub issue, not Thunderbolt.
But! I do have a new complaint. The downstream USB ports (both A and C) have electric noise on them. I discovered this yesterday when I hooked up my iPad via USB and analog audio cable at the same time. I needed to send Midi signals to the iPad from my Mac (which I know how to do over USB connection but not via Bluetooth) and I wanted to record its audio output via line-in. The audio signal was very noisy indeed! Downright unusable. I wondered what was wrong—pulled cables in and out a bunch, tried different sockets—until I tried my Mac’s own power supply instead of the CalDigit and suddenly had the nice clean signal I expected. Trouble is: no CalDigit, no line-in socket! I could listen live but have no way to record. I really need a way to send Midi to the iPad and receive audio digitally over USB simultaneously; or to get Bluetooth into the mix.
Still, I am disappointed to discover this noisy power coming out of the CalDigit DS3+. What’s the deal with Thunderbolt hubs and power? They run warm, even with power efficient Macs like this M1 Air, and these hubs can’t even supply a nice clean USB connection that won’t mess around with your audio? It’s not great stuff for the price!
I think the TS3+ will only power on if it detects a TB3 connection.
Just had the same experience on my M1 MacBook Air: install failed into Recovery mode. Reinstalled Big Sur successfully from there. Don’t appear to have lost anything except time.
Hi all,
I received the OWC Thunderbolt Dock (the one with usb-c ports) a few days ago to connect it to my MBP M1.
All is working well except… my two external hdd in 2,5" enclosures connected to any of the rear usb-c ports ! When I connect one on the front usb-port or on the rear usb 3 ports, it is powered. Tchating with OWC support didn’t resolve it, only saying to wait for next MacOs 11.3. All I know is that the front usb-c connector is 5V/1.5 A and the three rear 5V/1.1 A.
I have doubts that next update will resolve that, but let’s wait…
Can you share some details about these hard drives? What brand/model are they? If you assembled them yourself, what are the brands/models for both the enclosure and the contained drive.
It sounds like the drive may be requiring more power than some of the ports can deliver, especially because the higher-power front port works while the lower-power rear ports do not.
By your description, the front USB-C port can supply up to 7.5W while the rear ports can only supply 5.5W. So perhaps the drive requires something in between.
Any device that requires more than the minimum baseline USB power (100 mA for USB 2.0 or 150 mA for USB 3.0) needs to run a negotiation protocol to request more. The basic USB protocol allow USB 2.0 devices to request up to 500 mA (that is, 2.5W) and USB 3.0 devices to request up to 900 mA (4.5W). Devices that require more than that (up to the limits of the hardware) must use the PowerDelivery protocol to negotiate voltage and power.
The fact that the OWC tech thinks a macOS update will be necessary tells me that there may be a bug in the M1 Mac’s implementation of this negotiation protocol, either in the firmware or in the OS.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t help you much, since it doesn’t suggest a fix other than wait and see. Or maybe use an external power brick for the drive if it supports using one.
Hi, thanks for these technical explanations. All I can do is to wait for 11.3 and see what happens… For the drives, I have one hdd Seagate 2 To in one usb-c enclosure (standard) and one ssd Sandisk 1 To in a Storeva enclosure. But they both work when connected to rear usb-a connectors with usb-c/usb-a cable.