Can you daisy chain Thunderbolt hubs?

[adingley]

I am using just one two many thunderbolt accessories, and in my heart of hearts, I'd really like to have ONLY ONE tb cable from my MacBook Air to the hub/dock etc.

So here's my question:

If I already have a 14-Port Thunderbolt 4 Doc from OWC, (which has only 2 TB4 ports, the rest are USB-C / USB-A and other peripherals), could I also add an OWC thunderbolt hub (which appears to repeat 3 thunderbolt ports?)

I would have opted JUST For the hub, if I didn't ALSO need GbE and a bunch of USB A 3.1 ports

The rep on the phone at OWC (who didn't inspire a lot of confidence that they knew their stuff) said it won't work, that OWC hubs/docs need to be plugged directly into a TB port on your Mac to properly access the TB bus on the logic board. I was just double-checking if that's the case. Has anyone tried this and succeeded/failed?

 

[Alameda]

Yes. TB 3 and 4 are the same speed, 40 gbs.
TB 3 provides four 10 gbs internal PCIe ports and one downstream TB port
TB 4 provides one 10 gbs internal PCIe port and three downstream TB ports

So you can daisy-chain TB3 to another TB 3 or TB 4 and you can daisy-chain TB 4 to another TB 3 or TB 4 hub. OWC made a YouTube video which explains this and may help you decide which hubs you want to use and why. What it boils down to is this: A TB 4 hub only has 10 gbs of internal bandwidth, and the remaining bandwidth must be sent to the three downstream Thunderbolt ports. So most likely, you’ll want to use TB 3 hubs and not TB 4 hubs.

 

[PaulD-UK]

The multi-TB port TB4 OWC dock needs to be plugged in directly to the Mac, then you can plug 3 TB3 docks or devices into into its downstream TB ports.

But daisy chaining a second TB4 dock to it quite likely won’t work.

Only TB3 supports daisy chaining.

 

[OWC_TAL]

Hmm you should be able to daisy chain them!