Anker - Prime TB5 Docking Station, 14-in-1 Thunderbolt 5 Dock with 120Gbps Max Transfer, 140W Max Charging - Gray

I got this to replace my old Anker PowerExpand Thunderbolt dock, which was always solid and reliable, but was limiting my speeds severely during large file copies between external SSDs on my M4 MacBook Pro. To that end, this dock solved that issue perfectly. I went from being able to copy files at a few hundred MB/s to 5-6 GB/s, saving a ton of time! I also like that this dock doesn't require an external power brick, but that's under my desk and really didn't bother me that much. But what I really don't like about the TB5 is SD/MicroSD readers, which seem to be an afterthought on this dock; First of all, they don't support UFS-II speeds, so they're slower than the SD card reader built into my MacBook; I've also had issues where the card readers just disappear and I have to disconnect and reconnect my Macbook for them to show up. To make matters worse, the reader is on the SIDE of the dock! Clearly there is enough room on the front to put the reader, but I believe it was placed on the side to cut costs (the connections are probably on one PCB)... which is another thing; This dock is very expensive! I could buy a whole Mini PC for this price, and the dock just isn't really very well designed. If Best Buy sold the CalDigit TS5 dock, I may have spent a little more but I would have gotten a much better designed dock (that supports UFS-II)

Disappointing that the proprietary design of thunderbolt is still having implementation and compatibility issues in the 5th generation (requiring upgrades for functionality and not performance gains). But, here we are. pretty much the same dock from 5 years ago - just works with TB5 now. :shrug:

It protects all connected devices, even during an FPL voltage surge.