Troublshooting Help: Caldigit TS3 with M1 Mac

[davideotape]

I recently moved to an M1 Mac mini, and I'm having some issues with some peripherals and hard drives not working correctly.

my chain is:
- M1 Mac mini:

• thunderbolt out 1: External Hard Drive
• Thunderbolt out 2: caldigit Input

- TS3:

• Thunderbolt out: apple 27" Thunderbolt Display
• USB C 1: external hard drive
• USB A 1: magic keyboard lightning connector
• USB A 2: magic trackpad lighting connector
  • (need these because I swap my Mac mini with my work MacBook during the week, and need the peripheral to sync to it)
• USB A 3: Focusrite Bus-powered 2i4

- Thunderbolt Display out: nothing but I tried moving all 3 of the USB A peripherals here to troubleshoot and still an issue.


Issues:
- Focusrite loses connection and power, and even removing and plugging the cable back in doesn't fix it. only fix is a complete M1 restart.
- when the M1 sleeps the external hard drive connected to the calDigit gets disconnected
- maybe my imagination, but while I was trying to fix the Focusrite connection, I'm pretty sure I got a shock from the keyboard lightning cable that wasn't plugged into the keyboard (but was plugged into the calDigit hub.



any thoughts? is this hub bad? did I do something stupid setting it up? are there known issues with this thing and the M1?

 

[coolajami]

1. Focusrite is notorious for its USB issues: there are two ways to go:
a. Connect it directly to your laptop and the problem should disappear.
b. Dedicate a full USB-A bus for the Focusrite, which means that you may have to sacrifice the use of one of the USB-A ports in the back. I'm not quite sure how the TS3+ shares the buses between the USB-A backports (it may show in the System Report when the TS3+ is connected) but you may want to move around the cables and through trial and error, see if that solves the problem. Check Focusrite support on this.

2. External hard drive issue: disable power nap when is connected with a power adapter (in the settings/batter/power adapter/uncheck the power nap) and see if that fixes the issue.

3. Static electricity: Is this a new TS3+ unit? do you have any noise from the power brick? Do you use a surge suppressor extension? Have you removed the ground from any of your plugs for any reason?

Hope that helps.