thanks for the great summary ! if only unraid would hear the bells.... they claim "Thunderbolt Supported" but all they have is the drivers not the tools implemented... arrgh

What about MAPPLE RIDGE it has 5 pin and 3 pin - would this hack work?

I've REALLY enjoyed this post My only concern is which nas Os's will support all this? Synology dsm? would that be possible? Unraid, Freenas, or truenas?

I have all the hardware and diy synology boxes.

I've been working on variations of this for a bit and have my Linux laptop and my Intel Hades Canyon NUC smoothly doing 17Gbits/sec over Thunderbolt but trying to setup my M1 Mac Mini has been problematic.

In your example above - did you really mean to assign the same IP to the NAS and the Mac? My IP routing skills are weak, but in the Linux<->Linux setup they are on their own (OS assigned) IPs with no static routes setup and it works fine. With the Mac setup it can't seem to route traffic (ping, iperf3, etc) whether I assign the same or a different IP on the same subnet.

Chris, nice work. The pins you shorted above are the 1 and 3 pins on the Titan Ridge per the pinout.

I have the MSI Thunderbolt M4 card and attempting to figure out how to force it on in a similar way since I don't have an MSI board (curiosity killed the pcie card..)

Can I show you the MSI TB4 pinout and perhaps you can take a look to see if possible to power it on in a similar fashion?

Ron

I can give you an insight for the speed issue, thunderbolt 4 is configured differently from three and I consider it a slight downgrade, while you have four lanes only one is used for downstream connections and the other 3 are reserved for Display port pass through, I learnt this from a guy at sonnet tech - basically thunderbolt 4 is a step sideways from thunderbolt 3 , not an upgrade but a designation of what ports are allowed to do what - which thunderbolt three does not suffer from.