Hacker News Reader

Comment by gehwartzen | Hacker News Reader

Yep! As long as each PC is setup with all the necessary drivers and such its all plug and play. No issues with just ripping the cable out of my MacBook without "undocking" anything. It just reverts to the internal display without issues.

I kind of wish there were manual/dumb TB3 switches for this sort of thing but I have not seen any.

View on HN

You're not ejecting the external SSD before disconnecting?

I have a TB2 dock which I connect to using Apple's TB3 to TB2 adapter. I keep my Time Machine backup drive connected to the dock (along with 4K monitor, keyboard, mouse, and speakers). If I don't eject the drive before disconnecting from the dock, macOS complains about disconnecting the drive without ejecting it first.

Yeah. This is probably not the best thing to do and I do get the warning about not having disconnected the gpu and ssd properly but Ive never once experienced an actual problem from doing so (hundreds of times). No corrupted data or anything. But the SSD is mainly for photos/videos not time machine backups.

Check out Jettison.

Nice. Thanks!

I ended up buying Jettison (https://stclairsoft.com/Jettison/) to handle auto ejecting on sleep and remounting on wake (in particular, I have a PCIe SSD in my Mac Pro which macOS considers an external drive, rightly so, but still).

How is this not built into macOS already? It's literally "on sleep, flush and unmount".

Fantastic, thanks for the clarification. I'll be swapping Macbook Pro (work) for Mac Mini (personal) so this could be the way forward. Thanks.

If you are getting one of the new M1 based mac minis, eGPU doesn't work.

One more question — those magnetic connections, can it connect both ways? What I mean it, cable running away in either direction or is it orientation specific?

Just tested for you. Yep! It works plugged in either direction.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com