Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No it's SuperDock! But what makes Sonnet's latest Thunderbolt 4 laptop docking station so super? The superness is not the 19 top-end ports, although these are certainly impressive. It's not the 2.5 times faster Ethernet connection. And it's not the backward-compatible Thunderbolt 4 technology, which is certified to the very latest Intel standards.
What makes the Sonnet Echo 20 Thunderbolt 4 SuperDock so super is its built-in M.2 NVMe SSD slot, which means you can add up to 8TB of SSD storage to your system without connecting an external storage device to the dock or computer. But first let's look at the abundance of ports this dock boasts to connect devices at top speed.
SPECS AND FEATURES
The Sonnet Echo 20 Thunderbolt 4 SuperDock has a copious 19 ports. The "20" in the Echo 20's name includes the power supply port, which we don't usually count in our port countdown.
> One upstream Thunderbolt 4 port (40Gbps, 100W)
> Two downstream Thunderbolt 4 ports (40Gbps, 15W)
> One HDMI 2.1 video port
> Four USB-A ports (10Gbps, 7.5W)
> Four USB-C ports (10Gbps, 7.5W)
> Internal M.2 NVMe SSD slot
> 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet
> UHS-II SD card reader (312MBps)
> 3.5mm combo audio jack (front)
> 3.5mm microphone jack (back)
> Two (right and left channels) line out RCA jacks (back)
> 150W power supply
The Echo 20 has more ports than we've seen with any docking station. Even the Caldigit TS4 Dock (fave.co/3FyICOF) has only (!) 18, and it's this kind of Thunderbolt 4 docks that Sonnet is gunning for. Read our fuller roundup of our other recommendations for the best Thunderbolt docks for Mac (fave.co/3h1wVoY).
THUNDERBOLT 4, USB-C, AND USB-A PORTS
This story is from the September 2023 edition of Macworld.
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This story is from the September 2023 edition of Macworld.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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