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SnarkyBear

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 24, 2014
191
389
I have two Thunderbolt 1 ports sitting on my 2011 iMac that are doing nothing for me. I want to make them useful.

I could stick a Thunderbolt to Firewire dongle on there, but I already have a Firewire port and daisy chain the two external drives through it.

I could use more USB ports, but the few adapters I've seen are (1) for Thunderbolt 2 or 3, and (2) Bloody Expensive ($76 for a thunderbolt to a single USB3 connector).

Any suggestions where I can find reasonably priced thunderbolt -> USB devices? Any ideas on what I can do with those Thunderbolt ports?

Thanks!
 

Fishrrman

macrumors Penryn
Feb 20, 2009
29,279
13,377
The -BEST USE- for the thunderbolt port is to buy an SSD in a thunderbolt enclosure, and make it your boot drive.

Far, FAR faster than a built in platter-based HDD (assuming that's what you have now).
 
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mhafeez

macrumors regular
Oct 30, 2013
103
56
One TB port for external display and the other one for TB storage in RAID setup (daisy chain). Love it!

Screen Shot 2017-01-04 at 11.53.42 PM.png Screen Shot 2017-01-04 at 11.53.51 PM.png
 

Richdmoore

macrumors 68000
Jul 24, 2007
1,973
368
Troutdale, OR
I have the 21.5" 2011 iMac. I have two thunderbolt devices, both of which I think were a good value to keep the computer more current as it has aged.

1. Caldiget thunderbolt dock. I used this to get USB 3.0 on my otherwise USB 2 computer. I was able to dump my FireWire drives (as they broke) and use cheaper more modern USB 3 devices. Note that the only restriction is that USB 3 drives cannot be boot devices.

I could have used a cheaper thunderbolt to USB, but not only were they not available at the time, but I also needed pass thru thunderbolt for my next device (as the smaller 21.5" iMac has only 1 thunderbolt port.)

2. Delock Thunderbolt enclosure with a ssd inside. This allows me to boot from an external ssd drive, so I was able to upgrade without opening up the iMac, and the new drive really increased the speed over the older spinning hard drive.
 
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