LaCie sells an external hard drive with an integrated Thunderbolt dock under the name “1big Dock”, which supports Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C), USB 3.1 Gen 2 (Type A), DisplayPort 1.4 as well as an SD and a CF Card slot offers five additional interfaces. The 1big Dock is available in a version with magnetic hard drives up to 16 TByte and a Pro version with SSDs up to 4 TByte. We have the 16 -TByte variant tested.

With the enclosed Thunderbolt 3 cable (78 cm) you connect the external hard drive to a Windows PC or Mac. The 84 – Watt power supply can also be used by a MacBook Charge with electricity up to 70 watts. LaCie also includes a USB-3 adapter from USB-C to USB-A so that the 1big Dock can also be used on computers without a Thunderbolt port.

The internal 16 – Terabyte hard drive of the LaCie 1big Dock Enterprise-class Seagate IronWolf Pro in our test device achieved write rates of 182 Mbytes / s and read rates of around 230 Mbytes / s how to get it from a 3.5 “drive with 850 tours.

However, a USB 3.1 Gen 2 SSD from OWC on the front USB-A socket turned out to be much faster: it managed to write over 850 MByte / s and while reading still 762 MByte / s. That is almost as much as the SSD achieves at best.

In the SD card slot next to it we were able to use a UHS – II card from Toshiba 180 Shovel writing MByte / s and reading 215 MByte / s. A G-Drive with almost maximum speed or a 5K monitor from LG could be used at the Thunderbolt 3 output in series operation.

1big Dock (Thunderbolt 3 hard drive) Manufacturer LaCie Capacity 16 TByte free interfaces 1 × Thunderbolt 3, 1 × USB-A 3.1 Gen 2, 1 × DisplayPort 4K @ 60 Hz, SD card ( UHS-II), Compact Flash Weight without power supply 1.8 kg Dimensions 215 × 117 × 56 mm Colour Black and dark gray System requirements macOS from 10. 14 Mojave, Windows from , Thunderbolt 3 Price (manufacturer) 749 € Displayport and quiet fan We were able to connect a 4K monitor to the display port (1.4) on the back with 60 operate Hertz refresh rate. In addition, there is a CompactFlash slot, a Kensington lock, a status and an access LED in blue and a sleep button. The latter only sent the included hard disk to sleep, the interfaces remained active. The thermally controlled fan could hardly be heard (0, 17 Sone). Together with the robust access noises, we only measured 0, 25 Sone.

If you want to use your ports on a Mac or a Windows PC sparingly and need a large external hard drive, you can use the 1big Dock, as there are a few additional features – brings interfaces.

(lbe)