By Except its shape—a tiny, rectangular puck that may appeal to some more than others—OWC’s USB-C Travel Dock isn’t all that different from other hubs or dongles. I always suggest packing a USB-C hub or dongle, which usually connects with a short cable, when you travel with your laptop. A dongle isn’t the most ergonomically friendly choice; it sways around your desk and gets pulled in different directions by the devices you connect it to.
There are a few gadgets that provide an alternative method. The now-discontinued IOGear Thunderbolt 3 Travel Dock, one of my favorites, contained Thunderbolt power in a small, thin plastic slab. Another that achieves this is the Belkin Thunderbolt 3 Dock Core, which is still available for $65.00. Although OWC’s USB-C Travel Dock lacks Thunderbolt, it still has that small, portable design that I find quite appealing.
With a side length of 3.2 inches and a thickness of 0.9 inches, the OWC USB-C Travel Dock attaches to your laptop using a short USB-C cable that is a little longer than 6 inches. It’s a wonderful touch that it neatly stores in the Travel Dock’s base. The dock is secured in place by four tiny shallow pads on the base of the aluminum chassis.
Since the name is a little deceptive, this is a 5-in-1 hub. I usually think of a “docking station” as a powered device; in this instance, OWC’s gadget has a USB-C port that can only receive 100W of input power. Two 5Gbps USB-A ports with clear labels are located on either side of the dock. Other features include an HDMI 2.0 port, an SD 4.0 card reader, and an Ethernet port with an unknown speed.
A USB-C hub is very price-sensitive, and bestcomputerfinder’s list of the top USB-C hubs and dongles is based on my suggestions. (This is how bestcomputerfinder tests USB-C hubs.) When a $30 dongle can provide the same functions for $100, nobody wants to spend that much. What appeals to me about OWC’s Travel Dock is this: It costs about $30 at the time of writing. That falls exactly in the middle of my top selections, which are between $20 to $40.
With perfect performance, OWC’s USB-C Travel Dock streamed a 4K video at 60Hz across a 4K single screen. (In total, it dropped 8 frames out of roughly 72,000 frames.) One 4K display works best because I’ve seen USB-C docks attempt to output to two and occasionally fail. Not even the dock heated up to a degree that I would consider warm.
Since the laptop’s USB-C connection is 10Gbps, congestion will increase as more data is transferred via the USB-C cable. I observed stuttering and hitches as a result of congestion when streaming a 4K video and simultaneously moving data from an SSD. However, that is to be anticipated.
When a test SSD was connected, PCMark gave a score of 97.45 MB/s. That’s slower than I anticipated, but I wasn’t sure if OWC’s dock would perform on par with the Dockcase Smart USB-C Hub 10-in-1 Explorer Edition, which had some stability issues but achieved a speed of roughly 130MB/s.
