Best way to connect Thunderbolt 2 devices to new Mac Studio with TB3 (USB-C)?

As mentioned, with drives,

• Some old external drives may give you the choice of whether to connect via Thunderbolt or USB.
• In other cases, it may be possible to take drives out of Thunderbolt 1/2 enclosures and put them into new ones. This assumes that you have the skills to do this without causing static damage to the drives – and might not be an option with RAIDs where the RAID enclosure may have formatted drives in some funny, unique-to-it way.

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If you need to make a Thunderbolt connection to old Thunderbolt 1/2 devices, I believe there are only two options:

• The Apple Thunderbolt 3-to-2 adapter. It costs $50 and only translates Thunderbolt. It does not know how to make its TB2 side act as a plain Mini DisplayPort, and it does not carry significant amounts of power (and thus wouldn't let you connect a bus-powered TB3 SSD directly to a TB1/2-equipped Mac).
• The StarTech adapter. It costs $100 and appears to have all of the same limitations as the Apple adapter – plus an additional one: it is unidirectional. (Given this, I'm not sure why you would want to buy it.)

Nobody makes Thunderbolt 1 & 2 hubs any more. If you have Thunderbolt 1 & 2 gear that has Thunderbolt daisy-chaining ports, you could set up your equipment like

Mac --- TB3-to-2 adapter --- OldTBDevice1 --- OldTBDevice2 --- ...

to minimize the number of adapters you have to buy. But you're not going to find an adapter that has a TB3 input on one side and multiple TB1/2 ports on the other.

What makes your old drives only TB2? What connector does it have? Most drives old and new use USB connectors. That being said there are no TB2 to TB3 cables. Only the adapter is available to convert. I'm not sure the adapter can work with hard drives. It was meant for display purposes. If your drive are really that old I would suggest that their life span is now short. I would recommend new drives and SSD's to match your new faster Studio ports.

There is no need to buy the expensive ThunderBolt-3 <-> Thunderbolt 2 adapter (plus a very hard to find Thuderbolt-2 cable) for connecting also most all drive enclosures. It ONLY supports genuine Thunderbolt devices, so if your enclosures are actually USB enclosures, they will not work with that adapter.

Rotating magnetic drives are barely slowed by using USB-2 ports instead.

Exactly what make & model equipment are you connecting?

Jean Na wrote:

I am wondering what's the best way to connect my "old" TB2 hard

drives to a newer Mac Studio using Thunderbolt3 (USB-C) ports. I see Apple sells TB3 (USB-C) to TB2 adapters for $50, so

that's one option. Do they also make hubs (to minimize adapters), or even actual TB3 -> TB2 cables, to eliminate need for an adapter altogether?

What external hard drives do you have..?

(please post back with the brand and model number)

There were very few Thunderbolt 2 external drives, because of cost and lack of demand.

It is more likely that you have external drives with a combination of FireWire and USB ports.

If that is the case, then all you need is the external drives original USB cable and a USB-C to USB-A adapter.