I have a Thunderbolt 3 external hard drive I've been wanting to connect to my 6,1. I got a Lenovo P27u-20 monitor hoping that the built-in Thunderbolt 4 dock would allow that, but it's a no go. However, to test the display with a TB3 equipped Mac I connected it to an M1 Mac mini (which works btw including the dock), but then I realized I could connect the Mac mini to the Mac Pro using a Thunderbolt 2 cable with Apple's TB3 adapter. If I put the mini into recovery mode and share the external disk I get about 930 mb/s read and write from the Mac Pro. Not too shabby. 
However, if I start up the mini and share the drive over file sharing, but still using the Thunderbolt connection, the transfer speed is only about 300 mb/s.
So perhaps an M1 mini isn't the best mini for this since it only allows you to share 1 disk at a time from the Recovery mode sharing feature. Maybe a TB3 Intel mini would be better since it supports Target Disk Mode and has four TB3 ports instead of two. Of course a powered TB3 dock could be used instead, but those are hit or miss and the mini has more features. Any thoughts?
However, if I start up the mini and share the drive over file sharing, but still using the Thunderbolt connection, the transfer speed is only about 300 mb/s.So perhaps an M1 mini isn't the best mini for this since it only allows you to share 1 disk at a time from the Recovery mode sharing feature. Maybe a TB3 Intel mini would be better since it supports Target Disk Mode and has four TB3 ports instead of two. Of course a powered TB3 dock could be used instead, but those are hit or miss and the mini has more features. Any thoughts?
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