danwells

One important caveat on products like this (I found this out the hard way on an earlier generation) is that any cloud backup solution that will back up a RAID, but not a NAS (Backblaze is one, I suspect the same restriction applies to many others) considers these things to be NASes. So does any piece of software that doesn't like network drives - even when you're connected to the Thunderbolt port, it's considered a network drive. 

It's not really a Thunderbolt/NAS hybrid drive - it's a straight-up NAS that issuing Thunderbolt's ability to serve as a fast network interface - but it's a NAS from a management and software standpoint, and that's important to realize...

The good news is that almost any USB-C cable should charge an iPhone. I don't know if pure data (no power at all) cables are even USB standard legal. Every cable I've ever seen will carry at least 15 watts. I think even a Thunderbolt cable in a non-Thunderbolt port does 15 watts.  Of course, there are probably some non-certified cables that won't carry power (but I've never seen one), and I think some USB-A to USB-C adapter cables might be 5 watts instead of 15.

The one obvious exception is so expensive that nobody is likely to try and use it as a phone charger. Thunderbolt supports optical cables with optical-to-electrical transceivers in  in the connector ends. You do see them as extra-long Thunderbolt cables, and that's obviously not going to carry power unless somebody's run a couple of copper wires alongside the optical fibers. I don't know if hybrid cables like that exist, but I do know that at least some optical Thunderbolt cables are pure optical and won't carry power by definition. The good news is that an optical Thunderbolt cable is at least $200, and most are more like $300-$500 so it's not the kind of thing that's going to be lying around in a drawer waiting to bite unwary people looking to charge their phone - it probably runs from your Mac Studio to a big noisy RAID in a closet...

This card is essentially the Radeon Vega 64 that shows up in the higher-end iMac Pro (there may be modest differences in clock speed, etc.). The iMac Pro version has 16 GB of RAM, just like the WX 9100. Unfortunately, Vega 64s available separately have 8 GB. Unless you really need the 16 GB for a very RAM hungry task, or you have an application that uses the WX series workstation drivers, a standard $600 Vega 64 in the same eGPU box should perform similarly. I'm not sure that the certified drivers issue even exists on Macs? On the PC side, the GPU manufacturers write more stable drives that enable specific features in CAD software and a few other pro applications (not including Photoshop and friends) that work only with the "workstation" variants of cards. Many of the Radeon WX and NVidia Quadro cards are just the gaming GPU, sometimes actually downclocked a bit, sometimes with more RAM or some other minor variation, sold for 2-3x the price with a minor firmware tweak that enables the workstation driver. At the high end, there are workstation cards that use different GPUs.

Unless you know you need the certified workstation driver for some particular application, just use a Vega 64...