CalDigit Thunderbolt Station 2 eSATA 6G, 4K, USB 3.0, HDMI and Ethernet Ports (TS2-US-6010)

I bought this for the eSATA ports, because I have two RAID arrays that use eSATA (they're NewerTech Guardian Maximus mirrors). I'm using them for video editing, and was getting sick of fast-but-flaky USB 3 performance I was getting. The two interfaces appear to be equally fast, but the eSATA connection appears to be more stable (fewer performance hiccups) when editing video.Long story short, I have had no problems with this unit and it exceeds my expectations. I have the two drive arrays plugged into it, plus ethernet, plus a FW800 Thunderbolt adapter (sometimes used to connect to a backup drive), plus two USB 3 drives -- and I still have a USB port free on the front. Everything seems to play nice, and the speed is very consistent -- exactly what I want for video. (My drives are only eSATA 3G, FWIW, but the device appears to support 6G.)The only notes I have that may not be obvious:1. Even when I unplug the Thunderbolt cable from my Mac (2014 retina MBP 15), the unit remains powered on, and continues to power the attached USB drives (they are laptops HDs in external enclosures). I found that a little surprising, since I assumed it would cut power or something. Not a big deal, but something to be aware of, I guess. It does have a blue LED on the front so you know when the unit is powered on.2. It can get warm (not hot). It's not nearly as hot as all the hard disks and monitors floating around, but when the device is being heavily used, it does seem to heat up just a bit. When it's unplugged from a Thunderbolt host, it appears to go into some kind of lower-power mode and is not warm at all (despite still powering the aforementioned USB drives...).3. I'm using an Apple 2m Thunderbolt cable, purchased separately. I have no idea if the cable matters or not.4. I have NOT tried to chain another display off of this thing, mostly because I don't have an extra that I need to plug in. So I have not tested that at all.Overall, I'm very satisfied. It does exactly what I wanted -- semi-permanently-attached storage (my MBP sits on a desk all day, 95% of the time) -- without the flakiness I'd heard of from other docks. I have not seen crashes or other weird behavior related to plugging/unplugging (having said that, I have been super careful to unmount everything before unplugging, etc.). If you want eSATA, buy this with confidence.

I have a 2011 27" iMac that was feeling slow despite the i7 and 16gb memory, mostly because I could hear the disk swapping a lot whenever I switched applications. With 1TB SSDs now coming down in price I thought I'd try one out, but I didn't want to open up the PC, so my only choices were get a Thunderbolt drive adapter or get this dock. I ended up getting both a Seagate GoFlex portable 1TB drive with Thunderbolt interface as well as this Thunderbolt dock.I first tried using the Seagate Goflex with the new SSD. That actually worked great - I was able to use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the drive onto the SSD. What's more, I was able to boot off the new SSD!I then tried putting the SSD into an eSata adapter and connecting it to the CalDigit box. That also booted! I don't know why the CalDigit site says this only works with later iMacs, it worked fine with mine.The USB 3.0 features and HDMI support on this box also worked great. The only problem I've run into is that the HDMI display seems to disconnect when it goes to sleep, so windows on that monitor move back over to the primary display. It does wake up correctly, but I still have to move the windows back... a minor problem. This may be specific to my display, an HP LP2475w, I have not tested other monitors.Edit: That might have been an OS X or driver problem, I haven't seen the problem with display sleep in a long time - both the main iMac display and the HP LP2475w go to sleep and wake up normally and the windows stay where they were before sleep. The HP display does take longer than the main iMac display but that may just be the display itself rather than the CalDigit.

This review applies to using this device with the 2019 MacBook Pro 16 Inch.TLDR: this device is more of a problem than a solution. Don't buy it if you intend to use it with a 2019 MacBook Pro 16 Inch.I bought a TS3+ to achieve three functions with one connection: supply power, connect display and attach to USB peripherals. But the TS3+ causes frequent problems: display won't wake up, USB device don't show up after booting, USB devices disconnect on their own, causes Finder to freeze at times. One of these issues happens every day or two so the problems are continuous and endless. The small amount of time I save by plugging in one cable versus three or four cables is totally lost in the all the things I need to do to mitigate these issues: reboot Mac, power cycle the TS3+, call CalDigit support, read their support website, search the web for answers, etc.Spoke with their support which was friendly and knowledgeable. Support told me that the issue is with Apple and that CalDigit can't fix it. In my experience, when a vendor gives you an answer like this it means the problem won't ever get fixed.If you are still considering buy this device you might want to go to the CalDigit website, click on Support and find this device (TS3 Plus). Then look at all the support articles just for this product. There are about 60 articles detailing all the weird problems you will have and all the convoluted things you might have to do to attempt to solve them.