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I’m generally a cheapskate, but this time I decided to splurge. I solved the M4 Mac Mini’s dearth of USB-A ports by buying a Caldigit TS4. It’s got 18 connections, including two card slots and three audio jacks. Eight effingteen.
Total overkill, but you know what? I’ve been suffering from Apple’s apparently innate tendency to skimp on ports, bays, slots and jacks my whole life. My whole life. The transition away from floppies was a pain (and I lost a lot of data, eventually—who knew that later on they’d come up with drives and software to get data off old 3.5 floppies, after a stretch when you couldn’t?); I missed CD drives when they went away; I missed the SD card slot when it went away; and, almost every Apple computer I’ve ever owned or worked on—18 is my latest best count—lacks adequate ports. Even the very first Macintosh, the original 1984 128k, should have had two floppy drives when it only had one, so you wouldn’t have had to sit there exchanging floppies back and forth, back and forth, while it copied the application to a new disk. I just decided, the hell with economy. I’m a man, and I’m gonna get me enough ports. For once.
Even so, for the M4 Mac Mini, I think I’m going to recommend—or pass along a recommendation for—this:
It’s the Xcellon Pro 10 hub, USB-C 3.2 Gen 2, recommended privately by a reader who knows this stuff. At issue is that it’s capable of passing along 10 Gbps, like the front ports on the M4 Minis. If you use a 5 Gbps hub, you’re choking off half the happy flow of data to whatever you have plugged into it. A little on the expensive side, but that just gives it a better chance of not being super-Chin…er, super-cheap in build.
The Caldigit was a breeze to install but a giant pain to site. I have a sit-stand desk, so the entire welter of wires needs to be free enough to allow the desk to travel up and down. I ended up having to site a separate small table next to the desk to support the power supplies; the one in front is for the TS4. (The other is for the JBOD enclosure on the left.) Neither the cord from the plug to the power supply nor the one from the power supply to the unit were long enough on their own to allow enough travel. Hence the need to site the power supply halfway up.
I hated to do it. Give it a month and the power supplies will be buried.
The Caldigit did neaten up my desk considerably. The white wire from the hard drive housing doesn’t look good, true, but it’s the best I could do. It’s Thunderbolt 2, which, as you probably don’t remember, used cables with the same termination as Mini-DisplayPort. But they had to be Thunderbolt certified. So, as I understand it, and I could be wrong, not all Mini-DisplayPort male-to-male cables will do. A 1-meter Thunderbolt 2 cable would allow me to pass this wire under the desk—emphasis on 1-meter—but those apparently don’t exist to be bought any more. Or at least not ones that I can know for sure are suitable for 20-Gbps data transmission. The best I could do four years ago was this 0.5-meter Apple Thunderbolt 2 cable with Mini DisplayPort male-to-male terminations along with the Apple Thunderbolt-to-Type-C-Thunderbolt 3 adapter. Which is not quite long enough, but oh well. Are you bored yet? I’m certainly getting there.
Little orphan
Unfortunately, there is one casualty of all this. The Caldigit leaves my beautiful new Wise Advanced Co. Taiwanese-made card reader orphaned. (Somehow I knew I wasn’t going to get to keep this, because I like it. Whoops, no self-pity.) Anyway, I tested, and the SD card reader in the Caldigit is as fast as the Wise Advanced. Anyway, if you need a really nice CFexpress Type B card reader in a nice aluminum housing that’s only been used about ten times, that also reads UHS-II SDXC cards (here’s a link), let me know. It’s for sale. You can have it for a nice price.
Buuaaaaaaaah-hahaha!
Mike
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