Connectivity Question for a Newb

A single mechanical hard drive will not use up the full bandwidth of a USB 3.0 port – much less that of a USB 3.1 Gen 2 or Thunderbolt one. A Thunderbolt enclosure may have the advantage of being more likely to report your hard drive's S.M.A.R.T. status (useful for determining when a drive is in the early stages of failure), but its speed won't make your hard drive run faster.

With SSDs, speeds and interfaces vary a bit. You can get

• USB / SATA SSDs that don't benefit much (if at all) from anything faster than USB 3.0.
• USB / NVMe SSDs that benefit from USB 3.1 Gen 2 speeds.
• Thunderbolt / NVMe SSDs

You can daisy-chain up to six Thunderbolt devices off one Thunderbolt port – provided that these devices offer daisy-chaining ports (not all do). Daisy-chaining 5K Studio Displays may be out of the question, but it might be possible to daisy-chain some of your other Thunderbolt peripherals.

Some recent Thunderbolt hubs and docks can split a single Thunderbolt chain into three chains. You still have a limit of six devices (total) – which means five, after you count the hub or dock itself. One example of such a hub:

https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/owc-thunderbolt-hub

<<. Can I run the 2 Studio Displays off a hub? >>

NO, Absolutely NOT. Each requires essentially the full bandwidth of a thunderbolt Bus.

Hi-color, hi-resolution display data is THE fastest, most unrelenting data stream your computer uses.

Re: Drives:

Unless you have genuine ThunderBolt enclosures, your drives are likely perfectly fine off the front USB-C ports, which are limited to 10 G bits/sec = 10,000 M bits/sec or counting overhead about 1,000 M Bytes/sec, plenty fast for most drives.

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The Max version has genuine Thunderbolt ports on the BACK, USB-C 10 G ports on the front.

The Ultra has all genuine Thunderbolt ports all around, but is more money.