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Mac Air Thunderbolt 2 to D6000: will it work? Benefits vs USB A?
Hoping this is the right place for this question (vs. the Mac forum).
My employer has given me a Mac Air (2017), which only has USB A and Thunderbolt 2 ports, along with a Dell D6000 dock to connect two ancient Dell external monitors. I've decided to upgrade to a single ultra-wide display, which I'll connect to the dock via dp, along with a 1080p 60fs webcam and wireless mouse/keyboard.
Given all these peripherals, I'm concerned about performance using the USB A, so I'm looking into getting a Thunderbolt 2 to USB C adapter, and connecting to the D6000 via USB C instead.
As I understand it, the D6000 uses USB 3.1, so max data transfer is 10 Gbps with USB C, vs. Thunderbolt 2 with 20 Gbps. So the Thunderbolt port should give enough bandwidth to fully use the dock. However, I'm not sure if the dock will actually work, as I've read that some adapters only allow for data transfer one direction.
I'm new to Mac so have never dealt with Thunderbolt 2. Will this solution work? If so, do I need to buy an official Mac adapter, or will a third party adapter work?
jphughan
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December 27th, 2020 20:00
@dj866 Ok, quite a few things to clear up here.
First, Thunderbolt 2 only carries DisplayPort and PCI Express traffic. It does not natively carry USB. Thunderbolt peripherals that support USB peripherals incorporate PCIe to USB bridge chips, but the D6000 is not a Thunderbolt peripheral. It’s a regular USB-C peripheral, so you will not be able to run it from a Thunderbolt 2 port.
Second, the D6000 only supports USB 3.x Gen 1, which is 5 Gbps. You only get 10 Gbps with USB 3.x Gen 2. As for Thunderbolt 2, its 20 Gbps rating pertains to PCI Express, not USB.
Your best bet is to connect the D6000 using USB-A using the adapter that comes attached to the D6000’s USB-C cable. Then you’ll need to install the DisplayLink software. However, be aware that DisplayLink has some drawbacks that can be significant in certain use cases. I wrote about those in the post marked as the answer in this thread. However, if your system doesn’t have Thunderbolt 3, you don’t have the option of using “native GPU” docks that rely on USB-C or Thunderbolt 3, so if you want a docking station, your only options are DisplayLink-based docks like the D6000 and then the funky docks that are designed to glom onto the entire edge of Mac systems and plug into a bunch of ports simultaneously.