How am i supposed to have an external thunderbolt hdd with just 1 thunderbolt plug?

Thunderbolt is entirely intended to be chain-able.

You plug your display into your Mini. Then you plug your hard drive into your display. Then you plug another peripheral into your hard drive, so on so on.

No data transfer speed is lost, what-so-ever.

 

If you have a Thunderbolt Display, then any device you plug into the display using Thunderbolt will be as fast as if it were directly plugged into your Mac.

Thunderbolt is intended to be linear without sacrificing any performance.

Have a look.

 

I think you are confused about the underlined portion of your post. The TBD has two TB ports. One is hard wired male connector to connect to your mini... and the 2nd is a female TB port on the back of the monitor.

Yes... your mini only has a single TB port... but you can daisy chain devices through your TBD.

/Jim

 

I foresee an issue here. Let's say you decide to unplug the display... then there goes the drive as well.

Sooner or later, there must be hubs.

Thanks, intel -.-'

 

Well that's not true, but ok.

 

Unless there are SATA drives that have 10gb/s throughput, I don't believe there will be any actual loss.

 

No.

If you plug the drive in using one of the USB 2.0 ports on the thunderbolt display it will have USB 2.0 speeds.
If you plug it in using the thunderbolt port on the thunderbolt display it will have thunderbolt speeds.

 

If there were a TB>FireWire adapter, it would run at FireWire native speeds. Same for USB, SATA, what have you.

 

Plug the thunderbolt HDD into the display via thunderbolt!!

 

Mac mini | <- Thunderbolt Cable from display -> | Display | <- Thunderbolt Cable from HDD -> | HDD |

Why would you plug a Thunderbolt HDD into USB 2.0 when there's a Thunderbolt port on the display???

----------

What?

You daisy chain them.

The Thunderbolt Display plugs into the Mac mini's Thunderbolt port and the Thunderbolt HDD plugs into the Thunderbolt Display's Thunderbolt port.

Then you can plug another Thunderbolt device into the Thunderbolt HDD's Thunderbolt port and so on for up to 6 devices.

Thunderbolt.

 

Ahhh. I think I see where the confusion is coming from. I was reading this thread on the dunny and I just had to run over here and remedy the situation!

So here goes, as other posters have pointed out, there is a cable coming from the lower middle back of the display which has the magsafe and thunderbolt cable ends on it. That end you plug into your machine. There is also another port (female) on the back lower left of the display where the other ports are. That is there you plug in your Thunderbolt Hard drive.

Capiche?

 

What?!?

I think you're confusing yourself.

You plug the display into the mini. This fills the port on the mini but leaves the port on the display empty. You plug the HDD into the empty port on the display.

 

This thread is a little like the classic "the cup holder on my computer is broken"-support calls you get sometimes. You're never quite sure whether the person is making a prank call or not...

 

wow. I actually thought that the original poster was joking.....

 

Personally... I would plug the ethernet cable into the mini, since it is fixed setup. OTOH... if I was using a laptop, then I would plug the ethernet cable into the ATD so that the notebook could be disconnected with just the TB & magsafe cables.

/Jim

 

Here is the simple fact: Thunderbolt is PCIe.

It's that simple.

Now, there exist PCIe cards for Ethernet, graphics, drives and so forth. You name it, and there's a PCI[e] card for it.

So, imagine that the ports on the back of the display are directly attached to a PCIe card in your Mac. They will run at fully native speed and operate precisely the same.
Now, the only thing that would be sacrificed is if you clog the throughput. Gigabit ethernet will use a maximum of 1GB/s up and down. USB will consume a max of 480MB/s, FireWire is 800MB/s and so forth.

So it would be difficult to max out the throughput with these interfaces, but add a few FireWire or Thunderbolt hard drives and such and it would become, at that point, beneficial for you to use the Mac's internal Ethernet port instead. In any other case, you wouldn't notice a difference at all.

Summation: All of the ports on the Display should be treated as equal to the onboard ports of your Mini, so long as you're not using many high-throughput devices.

</thread>
<threadjack>

So who's waiting for the day when we only need a single port on our Apple portables? I mean, PCIe is so versatile there's almost nothing that can't be accomplished with it. If there are ThunderBolt hubs, I would never need another port again.
MagSafe, Thunderbolt, SD/Express Card (why the hell not)... that's all!

I know Apple made a mistake by assuming the same with USB when they made the iBook, but Thunderbolt is so much more capable and chain-able.

 

Pictures time!
OP, make your desktop look like THIS:

 

Nevermind