Thunderbolt to ethernet and thunderbolt to external drive connections

Google is your friend.

Thunderbolt-1 to Ethernet adapter - B&H Photo

Your 2012 MBP is old school. The Thunderbolt-1 port (aka Mini DisplayPort or mDP) is limited in its practical uses. You'll be hard pressed to find an external drive enclosure that connects directly to this port.

If you're going to use an external drive, buy one that connects via USB. Your MBP has USB-A ports and a Firewire (FW800) port as well. A USB-A to USB-C adapter may be needed depending on which drive you buy.

As for the Firewire port, a 9-pin FW800 cable fits that port nicely. Connecting to a 6-pin FW400 port on a drive enclosure will require an adapter or adapter cable.

One place to look for drives, drive enclosures, cables and adapters is OWC/macsales. They are very often recommended around here.

Short of a hub or dock, you have two options for adding another Ethernet port.

Apple Thunderbolt to Gigabit Adapter

• In the absence of a Thunderbolt 1/2 dock, this would tie up the only place into which you could plug an external monitor. That Thunderbolt 1 port can double as a Mini DisplayPort for attaching monitors with up to 2560x1600 pixels. Use a mDP-mDP cable, mDP-DP cable, or mDP-HDMI adapter, as needed. However, a non-Thunderbolt display or adapter has to go at the end of the chain. The Apple adapter doesn't have a daisy-chaining port, and so if you plugged it directly into the Mac, it would block you from using an external monitor.
• It looks like Apple may have discontinued it. I can't find it on their site. Amazon Warehouse has a few used ones for more than list price. B&H Photo seems to have some new ones for list price, but I wouldn't be too surprised if they ran out of stock permanently before too long.

Generic USB to Ethernet adapter

• This may be your best bet. There are lots of these – and your Mac does have USB 3 ports, not the slower USB 2 ones that run at only about half the speed of Gigabit Ethernet.

You're welcome.

If I were in your shoes I wouldn't bother with a firewire adapter. The technology has run its course and newer computers don't use it. I would keep it simple and just stick with the USB connection. There's no real world speed advantage in Firewire vs USB-3.

Can you use the Thunderbolt port to connect your external hard drive? The answer is yes. But a dock will be required. $

Servant of Cats' suggestion to use a USB-to-Ethernet adapter vs the Thunderbolt-to-Ethernet is a good one. Very inexpensive.

<< My hard drives have all USB-A plugs. >>

rotating magnetic drives are not slowed down at all by using the USB-A ports on your Mac, which are USB-3 speed. You will need a cable rated for USB-3 to make the connection. these often have a blue spacer insert, and have nine conductors which speeds things up.

basic USB-3 provides 5,000 M bits/sec, and that would give you 500 M Bytes/sec top transfer speed, about ten times faster than a typical rotating Magnetic Drive.

Lucar21 wrote:

Many thanks. My hard drives have all USB-A plugs. From your kind reply, should I look for a FW800 to usb adapter?

You can find many so-called USB-to-Firewire adapters on places like Amazon, but they are either

• Fraudulent products that cannot possibly work, and that may damage your equipment, or
• Specialized accessories for high-end test equipment, that if used standalone, are indistinguishable from one of the fraudulent products that cannot possibly work, and that may damage your equipment.

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If what you are looking to do is to use that Firewire 800 port to free up a USB port, I'd recommend that you look at these drivers and enclosures.

OWC Mercury Elite Pro – Desktop drives and enclosures with (USB 3 + eSATA + FireWire 800)

OWC Mercury On-The-Go Pro – Portable drives and enclosures with (USB 3 + FireWire 800)

These are, as far as I know, the only new drives and enclosures that still offer FireWire as one of their interfaces. If you had one of these drives, you could use either USB or Firewire now (whichever was more convenient). When the time came to move to a new Mac that had USB-A or USB-C ports and no good way to plug in FireWire devices, you'd simply stop using the FireWire interface, in favor of the USB one.

Note that FireWire 800 allows daisy-chaining – so you could hang a chain of up to six drives off your FireWire 800 port. However, if you did that, I believe that you would need to use either (a) the desktop drives, which get power from the wall; or (b) the portable drives, in conjunction with optional AC power adapters. FireWire might not offer enough bus power to drive several unpowered drives off the same port.

Lucar21 wrote:

Thank you, as well as thanks to Servant of Cats and Grant Bennet Alder for the clear suggestions. In sum better I continue using my USB 3 ports for external hard drives. In addition, I will move into a USB-to-Ethernet adapter which is the least costly option.

You're welcome, my friend.

And yes, this will be the easiest, least costly way to continue and move forward.