The purpose of a product like the StarTech Docking Station for Two Laptops is convenience. This isn’t a problem unique to the StarTech Docking Station – many USB docks and adapters rely on DisplayLink chipsets – but it means that users interested in this docking station who are running El Capitan will want to wait until updated drivers are made available. Some users have been able to get USB video to work by booting and connecting devices in a certain order (i.e., boot first, then connect the MacBook to the docking station, then connect the display to the docking station), but we were unsuccessful in getting any of these methods to work reliably. The “magic” of getting the StarTech Docking Station for Two Laptops to output video via USB relies on technology from DisplayLink, and many users have reported issues with the latest DisplayLink drivers and El Capitan. The displays still worked with our Windows laptop, so we knew that the docking station itself was still working, and some searching on Google revealed that our difficulties were likely due to our recent operating system upgrade. We initially thought this was due to a loose cable or driver issue, but we checked all possibilities, including reinstalling the StarTech drivers, and couldn’t identify the cause of the problem. Upon the first boot after upgrading, everything seemed to be working well, but after we rebooted once more, all of our displays connected to the StarTech Docking Station stopped working. When OS X 10.11 El Capitan launched about a week ago, we upgraded our Macs. You may have noticed in the previous section that our test Macs were running OS X 10.10 Yosemite, primarily because we started our tests prior to El Capitan’s September 30th launch. In short, the StarTech docking station did its job. USB file transfers were quick and error-free, our Ethernet network connection operated at nearly full speed and allowed us to connect to all of our shared NAS devices in the office as well as to the broader Internet, and we enjoyed audio shared between the two laptops on our dedicated 2.0 desktop speakers. Other than the compatibility issue discussed in the next section, the docking station performed as expected, and we were able to seamlessly switch between our Mac and Windows laptops with the press of a button while sharing just a single workstation setup. We also tried swapping out the Dell Ultrabook for a 2013 Mac Pro and everything worked as expected, although the value proposition for desktop users isn’t quite as good as it is for laptop users, due to some limitations of the USB interface which we’ll discuss later. We spent about a week using the docking station at the TekRevue offices, primarily set up to connect a 2014 15-inch MacBook Pro running OS X Yosemite and a Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook running Windows 10 to a shared Ethernet connection, Focal XS Book speakers, a Das Keyboard 4 Professional keyboard, Logitech MX mouse, and two displays: a Dell U2415 (1920×1200) and a Dell P2214H (1920×1080). For those familiar with keyboard-video-mouse (KVM) switches, this makes the StarTech Docking Station for Two Laptops sort of like a KVM on steroids. It’s important to clarify here that although you can connect two laptops at the same time, you’ll only use one laptop at a time, via the aforementioned host switch on the side of the docking station. This lower bandwidth limit does have its disadvantages, however, which we’ll discuss later on.Ī button on the right side of the docking station lets the user switch between laptops, with the connections labeled “Host 1” and “Host 2.” There’s a slight delay of between 3 and 5 seconds when pushing the switch button before all devices are recognized on the new host laptop, but as long as you’re not switching multiple times per hour, the delay shouldn’t be a major issue. USB 3.0 has a lower maximum bandwidth (5Gbps) compared to Thunderbolt (10Gbps) and Thunderbolt 2 (20Gbps), but it makes the docking station available to a much larger range of PCs and Macs. Unlike the StarTech Thunderbolt 2 Dock, which we reviewed earlier this year, the Docking Station for Two Laptops uses USB 3.0 to make its connection to the host computer. Today, we have something a bit different, both in terms of its connectivity technology and its capabilities: the StarTech Docking Station for Two Laptops. We’ve looked at a number of docking stations in the past, most built around Thunderbolt technology. Laptop docking stations are an increasingly important segment of the computing market, allowing users to quickly and easily bridge the gap between an ultra-portable mobile experience and a more traditional desktop experience with multiple large displays, external hard drives, speakers, and other peripherals. StarTech USB 3.0 Docking Station for Two Laptops
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