So essentially you’re saying it’s ThunderBolt 3 into the dock, but only ThunderBolt 1 (or an equivalent) out of the dock? That does make sense.
@professor @Insider your thoughts?
[New Release] PowerExpand+ 7-in-1 Thunderbolt 3 Mini Dock Now Available!
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Sorry, guys; I did not think that this would cause so much confusion. The Thunderbolt 3 port is capable of transfer speeds up to 40 Gbps, while the USB-A and USB-C data ports can transfer at speeds up to 10 Gbps (or 1250 Mbps). Yes, I know that those are not equivalent, but just look at this graphic:
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I think it’s 40Gbit between the host and this dock, it then fans it out into multiple ports.
To me this makes no sense as then you bought a 40Gbit computer and it gets 10Gbit.
An intelligent hub would offer 40Gbit out if no other data paths, if you then used say 10Gbit USB 3.2 then you’d get 30Gbit out of the Thunderbolt port, etc, etc. This is just non-intelligent division.
It’s not tested, we’re just guessing, the lack of clarity from Anker causing speculation, I could easily be guessing totally incorrectly.
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What I’m saying is: There’s a 40gbps link between the dock and the computer. The dock has to divvy that up between all of the different I/O. The video could be allocated 15gbps, for example. USB could be given 5 if its gen1. Second monitor? That’s more bandwidth. Audio? That takes its chunk. Network card? That’s 1gbps. It all adds up.
On top of that, certain busses only support however much bandwidth. For example. USB3.0 g1 only supports 5gbps. USB 3.0 g2 supports 10gbps. If there’s a SD card slot that’s sharing the USB bus, that could reduce the USB bandwidth.
An advertised speed of “Up to xxxx MB” or whatever, is likely just talking about the thunderbolt bus as a whole. The other busses you’ll be using will take a portion of that.
So when you pop in a USB stick, it’s not going to get anywhere near that advertised speed mainly due to USB sticks not being able to serve data that fast. But beyond that, the bus itself is only so wide, and lastly, it has to share the TB3 lanes with other data. You might get closer if you ran a daisy chained TB3 SSD.
All of this said, it can be difficult to saturate a TB3 connection consistently. It’s one of the fastest busses available. The hardest stuff to do is run monitors over these things. Two 4k60 monitors are going to utilize 24gbps alone. Then add 10 for a usb bus. 1 for network. That’s 35gbps already if you only have one usb bus.
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We typed overlapping replies, essentially I am agreeing with you, but criticism is how it is being done.
Say you used none of 10Gbit ports, the 10Gbit is still ringfenced, so not being used. So you only get the full benefit if you use all the ports.
If there was an output Thunderbolt3 “upto” 40Gbit then that would be better design, but as you connected USB3.2 10Gbit then it would drop to upto 30Gbit, etc, etc. Then you’d always get the most benefit.
Also imagine if the hub was just copying data between two devices connected to the hub, you should still be able to get 40Gbits out from hub to PC, that would involve a central switch in the hub, which would be a more intelligent, and costly, design. I don’t think Anker designed it like that, it’s just a dumb static allocation of 40Gbit fixed between all ports. But I’m speculating just from what is written at the top post.
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Yes, I believe we all agree on what this seems to do. We just put it into words 3 different ways.
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