Clonezilla support of USB4, Thunderbolt 4, and Thunderbolt 5

[Ken Pergola]

Hello and good day to you, Steven and the Clonezilla team,

I’m wondering about the current and future level of support for USB4, Thunderbolt 4, and Thunderbolt 5 devices when using Clonezilla for imaging or restoring systems.

As more laptops and desktops ship with USB4/TB4‑only ports, I’m trying to understand:

• Whether these interfaces are expected to work reliably with external drives and docks
• How much support depends on the Linux kernel and drivers included in Clonezilla
• And whether there are plans to expand or improve compatibility in upcoming releases

I’m mainly trying to plan ahead for newer hardware and want to make sure Clonezilla will continue to work smoothly in USB4/TB4/TB5 environments.

I also haven’t been able to get Clonezilla to reliably recognize my OWC Express 1M2 USB4 NVMe drive, and I’m hoping to take advantage of its higher throughput when imaging over USB4 ports.

Thanks for any insight you can share.

Best regards,

Ken

[Steven Shiau]

This is actually related to the underlying GNU/Linux operating system...
We used Debian or Ubuntu in our Clonezilla live system. Hence if it's supported by the upstream OS, yes, it will.
We keep updating the underlying OS, hence I believe it will getting better for the hardware you mentioned.
If you want to try, maybe give Ubuntu-based on a test. It comes with proprietary firmware, so it might work for your hardware.