I thought I wanted one of the stackable hubs and had my eye on a Hagibis MC25 Pro DP. I really wanted something with DisplayPort builtin for my monitor, and a place to house an external SSD. I dug through review after review on the options from Satechi, Hagibis, Quiizlab, and others. The biggest drawback for me was that they are all bus powered. The models that use the additional input power connected to a power brick seem to make the user choose between video output and one of the storage bays when connecting to a power brick. Additionally, almost all have users complaining about frequent disconnects of the storage bays. That was enough to all but turn me off.
After installing my monitor arm, I turned my mini on end with the ports facing me and had the epiphany that the back of my computer faces guests in my office and that things looked better with the ports facing me. Additionally, the vertical orientation makes the mess of cables look a little less messy. This was the death knell for the stackable solutions for me. I tried a Minisopuru vertical stand that offered an nvme storage bay, card readers and a couple usb c ports. It was aesthetically pleasing, but it failed after I set some files to transfer from an external drive to the WD Blue SSD that I installed in the hub/stand (not sure when because I was out of the office for a few days, but the hub was completely dead when I came back and my notifications were riddled with SSD disconnects). I definitely do not recommend that hub.
At this point I considered ordering a bus powered hub similar to what I use with my MBP, but on a desktop, if I plug something in, I don't want to worry about whether I have too many power hungry devices plugged into the hub. I just want it to power/charge my devices and do its thing. I ended up going with a
Thunderbolt 3 Dock from Monoprice. I ordered last week and it arrived yesterday. It's currently on sale for $100 alongside a 30% off promo that drops the price to $70. That price seems more than fair for the hub, power supply, and thunderbolt cable.
The Monoprice Dock is what you might expect from Monoprice. It gets the job done, isn't flashy, may not offer peak performance, but is a great value. My 1TB WD Blue in an SSK enclosure gives R/W speeds in the neighborhood of 500 MB/s plugged into a usb 3.1 10 Gb/s port. It's not quite the 750 MB/s I get when plugged directly into one of the thunderbolt ports on my mini, but is more than adequate for my Time Machine backup and some media files. The DisplayPort seems to be working fine with no issues thus far. Audio passes through to my wired headphones just fine. The SD card reader functions normally. The biggest downside is that there is no downstream Thunderbolt port. The other downside is that only one DisplayPort is useful to an Apple Silicon user, but I understood that going in. It's a winner for my needs, and at a price at or below what the stackable are going for, it's definitely worth a look.
