AppleInsider reports that Thunderbolt 4 details were accidentally leaked by an Intel Exec’s photo on Twitter

Malcolm Owen has an article at AppleInsider on Thunderbolt 5 details leak via deleted Twitter photo by Intel Executive.

So pretty exciting, especially since it keeps the USB C form factor and doubles it’s speed from 40Gbps to 80Gbps.

Already I love being able to use Thunderbolt 4 hubs on my Mac, and hopefully the new Mac Pro will use Thunderbolt 5 for impressive speeds from it’s ports.

OWC’s Rocket Yard on how to get 67% more performance on an external drive on an M1 Mac

OWC is reporting on what is obviously a bug with M1 Macs, because you shouldn’t have to connect a second display to get full speed write on the thunderbolt ports, but at least for now it seems you do.

Man Big Sur has been having some serious software issues when it comes to drives (losing support for SoftRaid for a full versions was huge!).

EDIT:

Since writing this OWC has figured out more ways to get the speed boost, check it out.

OWC Rocketyard Blog on M1 Macs actually having 2 Thunderbolt busses with only 2 ports

 

The OWC RocketYard Blog has a really interesting article on how the new M1 Macs actually have 2 thunderbolt busses even though they only have 2 ports. This is unlike previous Thunderbolt macs which had 4 thunderbolt ports, but only 2 busses, with 2 ports split on each bus. The new M1 Macs have only 2 ports but 2 busses, and with the new ability to use USB4 Hubs to split thunderbolt you can have the more ports.

OWC ThunderBay 4 Firmware update did not fix the issue of the drives ejecting

 

So after taking the time to do the upgrade on the firmware on my OWC Thunderbay as I saw in this post on their forums, and shutting down my computer over the night, I restarted and one of the drives disappeared.

Sure SoftRaid managed to fix it in under 10 minutes, but having this happen every restart or wake from sleep is not OK!
So I don’t want to have to do it, but I am going to try turning off Put Hard Drives to Sleep when Possible in my Energy saver to see if I can get around this issue (the post on OWC said that is the issue).

We shall see if that helps. And I have allot of spinning discs that I actually would like to have spin down when possible, but just not have my whole raid go down by dropping drives.
Super frustrating.

My OWC ThunderBay 4 Thunderbolt 3 has been having drive ejects, Firmware Update Available

 

So I want to preface this with the fact of just how much I love OWC. I have been buying their gear for many many years, and it has always been very reliable, and they have amazing customer service. I have had them replace ram, and quickly get back to me on issues for years and years.

Lately though I have been a few issues, and this post is about one of them.
So I have a fairly new Thunderbay 4 Thunderbolt 3 and am running a full version of OWC’s amazing Softraid to run it in RAID 5. It is way too small with 4 2TB drives, for a 6TB raid. I am on an iMac Pro running Catalina 10.15.6 and all the sudden have been getting drive drops often on waking up from sleep, or when restarting, forcing a quick rebuild or making me restart to get the drives back. And constantly having the drives be out of sync, though Softraid fixed this in a minute or two each time.
Now it hasn’t happen while I was working and I haven’t lost anything, but it has been annoying.
Now while looking at their forums for another issue I will post about in another post, I ran into this post about Disk Ejecting a firmware update. I quickly downloaded and went through the steps to install. It basically says it has to do with allowing drives to sleep in the energy saver control panel, but this firmware should permanently fix the issue.
As with most things of the sort it is made a bit of a longer process, because of having to disable SIP or System Integrity Protection, and is a multi-step process since you have to then install a kext file, restart and then eject your drives, and install the firmware update.
Now this is where I would add a note to the process, because while the instructions said it would take about 30 seconds, once I selected the firmware and hit the FWUpdate button. It did not take 30 seconds, in fact my computer sat beachballing for well over 30 minutes, before it successfully did the update. This is fine if it fixes the issue, but 30 SECONDS IT DID NOT TAKE!!!
The process then has you uninstall the KEXT, turn SIP back on restart and then turn back on all of your networking which you have turned off earlier.
When I restarted the final time Softraid again said the drives were out of sync, but lets hope that has fixed the issue.

Problems with iMac Pro and OWC Thunderbolt 3 dock and displayport connector

So when I got my new iMac Pro (as my MacPro 4,1 finally bit the bullet) I decided to get an OWC Thunberbolt 3 Dock with 14 ports and 85 watts of power to connect more peripherals to my Mac.

Overall I love Other World Computings products and their service. They are a great company, but the problem with this device for me is the mini displayport.

I have the iMac Pro and an LG 4k 27 inch monitor. I was trying to hook up the LG via the mini displayport in the dock. First I tried an Amazon basics mini displayport cable to displayport cable and it just didn’t work at all.

Then I tried an Amazon basics mini displayport to HDMI connector. This seemed to work, and both monitors worked, but whenever the computer slept the displays and woke back up the second monitor acted as if it was just found, and all the windows that were on it would be moved to the iMac Monitor. Super frustrating especially when using, Premiere Pro, After Effects or DaVinci Resolve across both monitors. The display also did the same thing when I connected or disconnected anything to the dock, including my iPhone or iPad using the front high powered ports, or the SD cards!

I thought maybe it was the connector, so I spent quite a bit more money and went to apple and got the Belkin mini display port to HDMI that they listed since I didn’t see a direct one from Apple. When I got it, it had the exact same problems.

I contacted support, and they got back to me very quickly, and after some back and forth, basically it came down turning sleep off, but I didn’t want to do that, nor turn off let hard drives sleep, as I don’t want to ruin my RAIDs by having them run all the time.

So after being frustrated for a while I went for a USB 3.1 to HDMI adapter, and this I connected to the back of my awesome OWC ThunderBay 4’s Thunderbolt port, and the monitor works great now! Everything (well almost everything, as Messages seems to jump back to the iMac monitor quite a bit) stays on the second monitor when the computer sleeps and I can leave everything going to sleep!

And I can connected and disconnect things with the dock without any issues. The dock works great when I am not using it for it’s mini displayport connector. I am not sure if my dock has an issue with it’s mini displayport, or if this is just an issue with this dock and an iMac Pro, but it is something to know in advance.

Blackmagic has created an eGPU to work with Apple

BlackMagic has worked with Apple to create an thunderbolt 3 eGPU with a Radeon Pro 580 in it. It is not upgradeable, but has an HDMI and four usb 3.1 connections and a thunberbolt passthrough as well as 85W of power. It is $699 and sells from Apple to work with their laptops.

Very cool, though I think they might have missed an opportunity in not combining it with a Decklink, Intensity or UltraStudio for playback to an external monitor. Even if it used 2 Thunderbolt connectors I think the addition of at least a playback card would have made this a must have solution.

JMR Lighting Tower for new Mac Pro

Just saw an ad for this in Post magazine, and I guess they showed it off at NAB this year. The new JMR Lightning Quad Tower for Mac Pro is a PCIE expansion tower via thunberbolt for the new MacPro, that includes four full sized PCIE expansion slots, a built in RAID controler wth 9.6TG capacity, and brings your USB, Ethernet and Audio ports to the front.

Very cool. I am sure it is not going to be cheap, but what a great idea! Make a real MacPro out of a new one, if only Thunderbolt was a little faster.