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The OWC miniStack STX is the latest evolution of enclosures designed to sit underneath a Mac mini, bringing a Thunderbolt hub along for the first time.
There are many ways that you can expand the utility of the Mac mini. If you need more ports, you can always add a Thunderbolt dock, while storage can always be increased using an external hard drive.
Continuing from where the original miniStack left off, the OWC miniStack STX consists of an enclosure has the same width and length as a Mac mini. The design is meant to sit directly below the Mac mini, raising it off the desk surface by about an inch.
Just like the Mac mini it’s under, the miniStack STX is aluminum, complete with identical rounded corners to the hardware it is supporting. It is similarly spartan in its appearance, with the front bearing the OWC logo and two small LED status indicators, nothing on the sides or rounded corners, and all of the connectivity saved for the rear.
OWC miniStack STX review – Key Specifications
- Houses1 SATA drive, 1 M.2 PCIe SSD.
- Offered without drives, or configured with storage.
- SATA drive configurations from 1TB to 18TB, M.2 between 1TB and 8TB.
- 3 Thunderbolt 4 ports plus 1 Thunderbolt 4 to host Mac.
- 770 MB/s claimed storage performance.
OWC miniStack STX review – Ports and Connectivity
Around the back is the business end of the miniStack STX, with it offering a selection of extra ports that could be handy for M1 Mac mini owners. Occupying one Thunderbolt port on the Mac mini, the dock provides three more Thunderbolt 4 ports in exchange. What looks like USB-A ports aren’t, and are instead the exhaust vent for the unit’s fan.
A 20V DC power connection and a Kensington lock slot round out the accessible ports at the back.
With macOS Big Sur and a new Thunderbolt chipset, Thunderbolt has evolved. Instead of one host port only allowing daisy-chained peripherals, Thunderbolt is now a protocol that allows a hub and spoke configuration.
Interestingly, it’s not just a Thunderbolt hub. Host computers lacking Thunderbolt can use a USB-A to USB-C cable to access any installed storage and still get an, albeit expensive, USB hub. This doesn’t allow downstream Thunderbolt-only peripherals to work with a non-Thunderbolt host, though.
OWC says you can add a mix of up to five Thunderbolt devices, three USB devices, and two displays to be connected, depending on the host device.
For example, The M1 Mac mini can drive one display on HDMI and one on USB-C, so you could run the USB-C display through the dock if you wanted to. You can connect two screens if you have a 14-inch MacBook Pro or 16-inch MacBook Pro.
OWC miniStack STX review – Storage expansion
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