Must Have For M1 Mac Mini – New OWC Thunderbolt 4 HUB Review

Usb 4 hub. I pre, ordered this about a month ago and it finally showed up and uh yeah. So obviously, you know that the m1 max come with a limited port selection and because of that, i was looking for a thunderbolt hub and there’s tons out there. But this was kind of a brand new design. The thunderbolt 4 usb 4 that the m1 max have and haven’t seen any on the market. Yet so i thought this was worth buying and this will expand the thunderbolt 4 usb 4 port into four more ports, so yeah let’s run through the features, the speed, what it can do, what you can get out of it and then i’ll show you my super Clean desk setup back here that i built around this hub with the mac mini all right, so let’s get into what owc is claiming that this can do. There are three thunderbolt 4 usb 4 ports on the back, and i keep saying thunderbolt and usb together because they’re, basically the exact same thing now and they’re, just using the usbc connector but they’re the exact same bandwidth and owc is saying you can create up to Three independent daisy chains with this dock it’ll do up to two 4k displays or 5k 6k 8k display with accessories, and this is all running off of one thunderbolt cable to your m1 mac. This will also work with intel max and windows, pcs with thunderbolt 3. it’ll.

Also, deliver 60 watts of power to a laptop and it’ll keep your laptop charged, and i guess this is kind of why it comes with such a huge power. Brick it’s really well made solid aluminum build it’s got like a similar silver color to the m1 mac mini and it’s pretty heavy, so it sits nicely on the desk without moving around when you plug stuff in. I was kind of disappointed with the ugly blue, led logo that’s on top, and it kind of doesn’t really match the aesthetic of the hub, but luckily you can lower the brightness or turn it off there’s, a small pinhole button in the front you can just cycle Through it that way so let’s see what the bandwidth’s, like, i attached a few ssds as well as my 4k, monitor to see what it can handle. First, by doing the blackmagic disk test, with my nvme thunderbolt ssd and it’s, getting around 1 300 megabytes a second right around 2500 megabytes, a second read, which is basically what it’s like when it’s plugged directly into the mac mini’s thunderbolt port. Next, i wanted to test the speed of the front usb a port with a samsung t5 drive. It’S got around 414 megabytes a second right and around 450 megabytes. A second read, which is basically all that drive, can do through usb 3. So it won’t really matter what port you plug that into now. I have another nvme drive to test in a usb 3.

1 enclosure, so it won’t be as fast as the thunderbolt nvme but it’s getting around 700 megabytes a second right and 715 megabytes. A second read: the drive is capable of much faster speeds, and so is the hub but it’s the enclosure that’s the bottleneck here. So just to test that theory, i plugged it directly into the mac mini instead of the hub. I was actually getting slightly slower test results. I was getting under 700 megabytes. A second blackmagic disk test is a nice tool to see what the drives can do, but i want to do some real file transfers across drives connected to the hub. Just as a test. I transferred this four gigabyte red raw file from one thunderbolt nvme drive to the other nvme drive connected as usb 3.1 and transferred in 3.5 seconds. Next, i transferred that same file to a t5 ssd and it was around six seconds so almost twice as long. Then i transferred to the desktop to the internal mac mini drive and it basically transferred instantly it just transferred as fast as it would internally. As you can see, it performs nearly as well as the on board ports and the mac mini it’s. Pretty crazy, even just transferring from ssd to ssd seems super fast, while also having a 4k monitor plugged in and from what i’ve seen in the system report. When looking at the thunderbolt, it actually shows two separate controllers, which i’ve heard people say uh in the mac mini, which means you can probably hook up another hub to the other port and expand it to even more so.

You could take those two thunderbolt ports and run them into six thunderbolt ports with actually two extra usba ports. I haven’t tried this, but i don’t see why you couldn’t. Do it that way you could get even more connectivity. My biggest complaint is the design of the port locations. This could just be how i wanted it to look next to the mac mini. But maybe you prefer the input port on the front, but i think it looks kind of messy, with the cable coming out of the front and having to wrap around the back to plug in instead of them all just being on the back. You know if they were all in the back. You wouldn’t really see anything in the front, but i guess because of this design, it got me thinking of a different way. I could set up my desk and make it look way cleaner, let’s get into that. I just found this to look too messy and i tried a few things like putting the hub beside, but i didn’t like how that looked either. I found the slim vented drawer on amazon made for laptops. I thought it could be a good way to clean things. Up – and i was right – the mac mini fits perfectly into it, as well as the hub, and i really like how this setup is because it’s really easy to access the back of the mac mini and the hub. So you can plug drives in or sd cards without needing to be on top of the desk and because it’s vented it gets nice cool air, of course, i’m using the space, gray, magic keyboard and magic mouse with the aluminum space gray mouse pad from satachi, which Matches this nicely, the monitor i’m using is an lg 32 inch, 4k thunderbolt display on a basa arm the exact models linked in the description, along with everything else i’m using in this setup.

Alright, so that’s just my quick look at the new owc thunderbolt 4 usb4 dock that just came out. If you go to the site, it still says pre order for 149 u.s. So i don’t really know what the wait time’s like on this. But at least you know it’s out i got one and i probably got in on the first batch of pre order. So, if it’s, something that you’re interested in, i hope this video helped you out there’ll be links in the description to all the things that i’m using in this setup. If you have an m1 mac how you liking it i’ve been pretty impressed with it been rocking. This thing for a month now, over a month and uh yeah that’s it that’s going to do it for me. So this will probably be my last m1 mac video that i make for a while. But thanks for watching, if you like, to give it a thumbs up, if you dislike this video, give it a thumbs down twice don’t forget to hit that notification. Bell i’ll, see you guys in the next one. There are three from fr: fun thunderbolts! Why am i holding the box? I don’t really need to hold the box. I need to go to bed. Okay, 6k.