hey guys it's max today i am super excited to check out
this little device that's in here which is probably
the best most needed accessory for the new
m1 max i ordered this about three weeks ago so we finally
just got it in and this is owc's thunderbolt 4 and usb 4
hub now yes apple doesn't advertise that these machines have thunderbolt 4 but
they do there's only one limitation stopping him from advertising that
and i think thunderbolt and the connectivity is actually the weakest
part of the new m1 max now yes on the macbook
air and the macbook pro the base models always had two thunderbolt ports
but the mac mini had four previously and the option for 10 gigabit ethernet
but now it doesn't we literally only have two thunderbolt
ports here now what a lot of people don't know and what owc figured out
is that there are still two controllers for thunderbolt
so you can actually spread these out and what this hub here does
is it'll actually take one of those thunderbolt ports and they'll
make it into three separate ports plus a usb
now that is fantastic for people like myself where if you have a display and a
server connected
you're out of luck and when you try to connect a high-speed ssd drive
you can't you're extremely limited so not only are we going to test out
how much bandwidth we get with these ssds and if we have any performance
loss through the thunderbolt and the usb port we're also going to be connecting
it to my 6k display my qnap server and a high speed drive
to see how well it does and this could be a game changer for those of you guys
that bought an m1 mac let's go ahead and pop this thing
open and the box is surprisingly heavy and
the actual hub itself is pretty dang heavy and solid as well it's made out of
aluminum over here and then one really cool thing is that
the usb port up front it's not a standard five gigabit per second like
apple gives you on a lot of their macs it's a 10 gigabit
per second port so that's twice the speed and then
this front thunderbolt port is where you connect your computer
it's kind of weird that it's on the front so let's spin this thing around
and there we go on the back we have our power input and then
we have three thunderbolt 4 outputs which is great we even have some locks
here if you need to lock something and so it doesn't
accidentally disconnect taking a deeper look in the box
we have our thunderbolt 4 cable that is included
a little bit of paperwork and then we have this
massive power brick and it does seem like you need to use this
especially if you want to get power if you're connecting a laptop for example
to this hub it can actually charge it at the same time which is great
but i want to go ahead and connect it without this 110 watt brick and see
if we can use it without it let's go ahead and plug it in and even though i
am testing it with an m1 mac this actually can work with the
new windows laptops that also have thunderbolt 4.
i am not seeing any light at the front here so i'm guessing
that it is not working just off of the thunderbolt 4
bus let's go ahead and plug in one of these
drives just to make sure and no it is not working that is unfortunate
because it would be cool to be able to at least use a few
low-powered accessories if you're on the go but it looks like that is not the
case so let me flip it onto this side and i will go ahead and plug in the
power let's start our tests with the slowest drive i have this is the samsung
t5 which is extremely popular i'm gonna go ahead and
open up my blackmagic disk speed test and it looks like we're
getting about 380 on the right and pretty much the same on
the read so just under 380. now let's test it out through
our hub here wow okay this is very very interesting now we're getting 400 on the
right just dipped under 400 and let's check out the read we're above
400 on the read as well now this might seem extremely
odd how are we getting faster speeds when you're going through
a hub then connecting directly well there's a
very good explanation to this and we talked about this
in our macbook pro m1 review and that's because
with the controllers that are built into the m1 a
regular 5 gigabit per second usb actually slows down
compared to the intel max we saw across the board
i did a ton of testing transfers are slower just regular speed tests are
slower and that is a downside that not really many people knew about
when you're connecting through a hub like this owc it has its own controllers
and that is what changes thunderbolt into usb and we end up getting faster
speeds and in some cases i got about a hundred megabit per second faster
depending on the drive so this t5 is just slightly faster so
that is really good news not only do we have more ports for connecting our
external ssds we get faster speeds as well and then
connecting this t5 through the usb a port that's on owc
also gives us actually just over 400 megabit per second
compared to about 380 directly to the max so no loss there
now let's go ahead and step it up and what i'm gonna do is i'm going to
connect my four terabyte thunderbolt ssd we did a review on this thing it is
fantastic i'll link that review in the video description
great for storage and video editing let's go ahead and connect actually
first without the hub this thing is extremely
fast so it looks like we're getting about
830 or so on right using this thunderbolt
external ssd in usb mode so it's connecting
over 10 gigabit per second uh usb so we have 786
and 695 so we're not hitting that perfect thousand but you never really do
let's plug it into the thunderbolt 4 hub and it looks like this time around we
have 581 on the right and about 550 read which makes it seem like it's
connecting over five gigabit per second instead of 10 gigabit per second but
that is odd so let me go ahead and swap this cable
and see maybe it's the cable or maybe this owc
isn't going to give you 10 gigabit per second through those ports which it
should so this cable is actually labeled 10 gigabit per second
where the other one wasn't let's plug it into that same exact port here
all right wow okay look at that speed difference now we're at 1170 right
in 1606 read so all i did there was i swapped
the cable and these speeds are actually faster
than your standard usb c 3.2 i don't know if this is because it's usb
4 and using usb 20 gigabit per second or something but
the speeds are absolutely incredible so you want to make sure that
you have the right cable get one that is specifically
labeled 10 gigabit per second and now let's go ahead and throw in
this thunderbolt cable this is what it's actually designed to use
and let's go ahead and start out plugging in to our mac
of course we only have two ports here which is the main reason for this
is to give you more ports but let's check out the speeds and bam
we are almost at 2000 right and as far as read we are at 1700
and now plugged into the owc we're getting
just above 1100 on their right so that is a pretty noticeable difference in
performance and as far as the read we get 17.77 so
slightly higher now i'm not sure why this is
so i went ahead and i swapped my four terabyte
for the custom ssd that we built and we showed you guys how to build
in a video and look at that we're getting at 1893
right about 1900 and for the read we're getting over 2300 here
so this might just be a limitation with this drive
and maybe the thunderbolt thunderbolt 4 connection because
this one is performing very very well basically the same or actually slightly
faster than when i connect it directly to my m1
mac here i get 1825 and 22.72
and now i want to push this owc thunderbolt 4 hub
to its limits i'm going to connect it to the m1 mac and my 6k display
but i want to say this very interesting that owc decided to give us
three thunderbolt 4 ports from one single port that means if you have one
of these instead of getting two ports or four
ports that you had with your previous one you get up to six
thunderbolt ports and on top of that two additional usb
ports that run at twice the speed of the ones back here
just from a single thunderbolt 4 controller so let's go ahead and grab
this and move over to my desk all right so we're at my desk here and i've been
using the m1 mac mini it has been working great and i'm pretty much ready
to replace the beast that's behind me and make a good amount of money back
since it has been working so well for my needs the only issue is
not having enough ports so right now i have pretty much
all of the ports on the back maxed out i have my 6k display
i have my qnap central nas server plugged in which i need
and then i have one usb accessory and this ultra fast ssd but has four
terabytes of space i have to connect over
standard usb which really slows it down and i can't plug
anything else into the system so let's go ahead and run this speed test
as you guys could see i'm getting about 340 megabytes per second
and as far as my central server let's go ahead and test that and this should be
full speed because i am plugged in directly through that port
and i'm curious if i'm going to get slow downs
when i'm not connected directly let's go ahead and unplug my accessories and we
will plug in our owc thunderbolt 4 hub
and now let's go ahead and plug everything into our hub
and plug in the hub perfect our qnap is showing up
right away so it looks like we're getting slightly slower on the right
speed but our qnap does fluctuate i'll let it run a couple times
read speed is looking to be the same so if we do have a loss
it looks like it might be about a hundred megabyte per second
roughly around there on the right but our read speed looks to be
basically identical which is fantastic
let's go and switch back over to that four terabyte
and remember in the past i was running this at about 340 megabyte per second
because i didn't have the proper connections available now i am getting
1583 right which it seems like it was even better than before with the macbook
an 1827 read very
very good performance here yeah it was actually roughly about 1100 with my
macbook pro
awesome speeds so we went from about 340 megabyte per second when i have to use
my external ssd to about 1580 and 1855
much faster speeds and what i typically do is i transfer from my server to the
ssd if i need to work at home or on the go
and back and forth that makes a dramatic difference in performance
and not only that the server performance stayed about the same
and i now have an extra usb port on the back of my m1
mac mini i have another usb that's twice as fast
on the owc thunderbolt 4 port and i have one more thunderbolt 4 port over here
so much more connectivity and much faster speeds now i want to do one final
test i'm going to go ahead and unplug my pro
display xdr and let's go ahead and plug it into our
owc hub now i want to test this out just in
case you're somebody that has one of those lg
5k displays or you have a 6k display and bam
it is actually turning on and you want to use two of these
the thunderbolt 4 hubs to get six thunderbolt 4 ports and then two
additional usbs from your m1 mac mini looks like it is
working just fine we are still running at full 6k
resolution we still have all of our options for hdr
video editing everything is working perfectly it didn't scale back the bit
depth of the display or the resolution like it could have
and let me go ahead and run this test once again
all right so this is the four terabyte ssd and we're still getting top-notch
performance maybe even a little bit better than before
with the display plugged in and our thunderbolt
ssd and our thunderbolt server i'll go ahead and flip
back to that one bam it is now actually performing exactly the same
as it did when it was directly plugged in
to the m1 mac maybe even a little bit faster actually
wow that is amazing so not only am i getting the same exact performance
with my display plugged into it the server plugged into actually
uh pretty good maybe even a little bit better and with my ssd
i'm going from 340 up to 15 and 1900 megabytes per second
massive difference i now have two extra usb ports available
and i have an extra thunderbolt 3 available on top of all of this
which i could connect one more of these hubs so
that actually works better than i expected
and it's 150 bucks it's not like a massive dock that gives you
10 15 ports half of which you don't really need and it costs 300 or 350
dollars the price is pretty good as well so if
you're somebody that bought a m1 macbook pro
macbook air and you need a few extra ports especially if you want to do a
desktop setup or if you want to use this powerhouse as
a full-fledged desktop this is going to be a must-have
accessory so we're going to go ahead and link it down below
and if you want more info on this ssd or the custom one that is actually running
even faster we'll have these links right over there
thank you guys for watching has been max and i'll catch you in the next video