CalDigit or Belkin Thunderbolt docks: which is more reliable @ same price?

[thewap]

Caldigit solid and fast..

 

[BeatCrazy]

Had the CalDigit 2 years now, rock solid!!

 

[ColdCase]

Caldigit is OK but Startech makes a better Doc, however.

 

[chrfr]

Caldigit is OK but Startech makes a better Doc, however.

The first generation Startech and Caldigit are actually the same hardware in different cases. All the ports are in the same place on each. The second generation hubs appear to be different. Why do you say the Startech is better?

 

[ColdCase]

You may be right about the first generation, although I think the housing material may be different. The Caldigit seemed to overheat at times where I never had a problem with the Sartech.

For most here there may be little difference besides interfaces (Caldigit has two SATA, three USB where Startech has one SATA and four USB plus optical audio). The Startech chip set looks a little better on paper. My neighbor has a second generation Caldigit and he experiences a quirk now and then, especially an annoying audio pop through the speakers attached when restarting or shutting down the Mac. Sometimes a USB drive will disappear and there are a couple USB devices the Dock doesn't seem to recognize, mostly SD card readers. Seems he always gets a eSATA disk ejected improperly warning when he starts up the Mac.

 

[dyn]

I have the first CalDigit one and it doesn't overheat. There can be a lot of reasons for the overheating so I wouldn't simply point the finger at CalDigit. Aside from the fact that a sample of 2 says absolutely nothing about the quality of the product.

 

[pjny]

owned caldigit v1 for several years. still going strong. it is warm to the touch.

I have the first CalDigit one and it doesn't overheat. There can be a lot of reasons for the overheating so I wouldn't simply point the finger at CalDigit. Aside from the fact that a sample of 2 says absolutely nothing about the quality of the product.

 

[carestudio]

The first generation Startech and Caldigit are actually the same hardware in different cases. All the ports are in the same place on each. The second generation hubs appear to be different. Why do you say the Startech is better?

You may be right about the first generation, although I think the housing material may be different. The Caldigit seemed to overheat at times where I never had a problem with the Sartech.

As far as I could tell, Caldigit sold their first generation of thunderbolt dock design to all other brands, so they should have the same boards. If you believe caldigit's one seems to overheat sometimes, I would stay with the overheat one since they are using aluminum case design, the startech one is plastic and could cause potential overheating problem in a long run. This is valid only if all other bards such as startech are using caldigit's same boards just replace caldigit's case to plastic one.

for your reference, a good article is talking about chassis design and how to choose a better one.
http://crazydiamondstar.blogspot.com/2016/02/device-getting-hot-good-or-bad.html

 

[johnnyturbouk]

I have not tried the Caldigit, but I got the Belkin thunderbolt 2 dock. I'm not very impressed with this whatsoever.

Pros
Design is compact, and looks sleek, has single usb3 on the front, thus can hide the remaining ports on the back.
Has Ethernet, hdmi and headphones on the rear, which allows one to hide the cables behind my iMac

Cons,
-USB3 is limited. I tried a Samsung evo via a usb3 dock which gives me 410mbs write 450 read, when connected to the dock, the reads go down to 350, and the writes, a measly 280 Mbps/s. I tired this with a different usb3 enclosure and noticed that for ssds, the belkin dock is markedly slower than native usb3 or my £15 usb3 hub.
- Not truly hot swappable: when unmounting drives, if one tries to reconnect the drive, whether an external hdd, ssd, sub thumb drive, I need to restart the iMac. This issue using the same peripherals via my cheap usb3 dock.
-Ethernet does not flawlessly work, it sometimes hangs me use, and refuses to connect after waking from sleep. I tried this on my mbp also and noticed this issue.
-Daisy chaining my dell monitor from the hub works well, apart from instances of freezing after waking from sleep.

Given the obscene cost of the dock, I have decided to rerun the item instead.

 

[ColdCase]

If you believe caldigit's one seems to overheat sometimes, I would stay with the overheat one since they are using aluminum case design, the startech one is plastic and could cause potential overheating problem in a long run.

The Startech enclosure is only partially plastic, just where the vents are and the vents seem to be larger which may be why there are few if any reports of it overheating (airflow is a good way to remove heat). My first gen has been on and abused 24x7 for three years without a hiccup, but it does get hot sometimes. One can formulate plastic to be a decent conductor of heat. I've worked in the industry where we cram high temp components into a small space and then try to get the heat out.

Dunno if the boards are the same, Startech specifies the chipset the use, haven't seen caldigits.