OWC Drive Dock with Thunderbolt 2 & USB 3.1 Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

I started the review by mentioning that this isn’t the cheapest docking station, so let’s get to the costs. At the time of writing, the OWC Drive Dock (OWCTB2U3DKR2) can be found on Amazon for $269.75 in the US and £246.02 in the UK.

Conclusion

The Drive Dock is the first OWC product that I had the pleasure to test and it was a great start. The Drive Dock looks good and features a premium finish. The unit itself is quite heavy which will give it a stable position on any surface. The weight is due to the built-in PSU which is something that I like. It offers you a cleaner desk setup with fewer power bricks and AC/DC adapters laying around.

While the unit has an overall great finish, there is one place that could use improvements. Don’t get me wrong, everything works as it should. But the two soft-power buttons on the top of the unit lack the same premium feel that the rest of the unit has. That said, they work as intended and every time. Perhaps a place to improve on the next version of the model, perhaps one with Thunderbolt 3.

The selling point in this unit, besides the dual-drive docking abilities, is the dual connection options. The Drive Dock features a classic USB connection for support with almost any system, but that’s not the highlight. The Thunderbolt 2 ports are. The two ports allow for daisy chaining of devices to a single host port, which is another thing that provides you with a very clean setup. Thunderbolt 2 also offers better performance when compared to USB. We’ve seen the clear differences in the performance results on the previous pages.

What’s left to say, well, the Drive Dock supports all types of drives: From large capacity 3.5-inch hard drives to speedy 2.5-inch solid state drives. RAID is partially supported, but only software RAID.

Pros

• Dual Thunderbolt 2 ports
• USB 3.1 connection
• Easy dual-drive docking
• Built-in PSU for clean setup
• 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch HDD and SSD supported

Cons

• Only software RAID where supported

“OWC’s Drive Dock with Thunderbolt 2 and USB 3.1 provides a good performance. It also looks good and allows for a clean setup.”

Thank you OWC for providing us with this sample.