Belkin USB-C dock
An expensive little friend for your MacBook.
The aluminium finish and tapered design are undeniably sleek, and thanks to its moderate size, it neither dominates the desk nor gets carried away by the weight of the connected cabling.
The dock can support two external 4K displays via one of its Thunderbolt 3 ports and the DisplayPort, or alternatively, a single external 5K display. You’ll find the standard affair of ports — two super-speed USB-A 3.0s at the rear and one at the front, Gigabit Ethernet connection and two 3.5mm jacks for headphones and mics.
The show-stealers come in the form of the two Thunderbolt 3 Type-C ports, one of which will attach to your MacBook and provide it with up to 85W of power along with data transfer, and the other of which can be used for displays, hard drives and other connections, even allowing you to daisy chain up to five devices.
If you intend on using an external hard drive, we’d recommend connecting it via the Thunderbolt 3 connection, as it will get you close to the same speeds as plugging directly into your computer (around 420MB/s using a Samsung external SSD), whereas the USB Type-A port suffered around 100MB/s drops in both write and read speeds in testing.
This is a very expensive dock, but the $500 mark is pretty standard for a Thunderbolt 3 dock with this kind of featureset. As such, before buying the Express Dock HD, we’d make sure that you actually need everything it has to offer, as you can definitely get a more affordable alternative that ditches the higher-end features.
Verdict
While expensive, this MacBook USB- C friend supports a lot of device options.