Sonnet’s Thunderbolt 5 dock might be the best I’ve ever tested

Sonnet’s Echo 13 Thunderbolt 5 SSD Dock carves out a new tier in both price and performance, blowing away conventional Thunderbolt 4 docks as a new tier of ultrapremium Thunderbolt 5 docking stations takes hold.

I fully expect more Thunderbolt 5 docking stations to be released. Hopefully, their performance meets or even exceeds that of the Sonnet Echo 13, which should place among the best Thunderbolt docks that we recommend that you buy.

Sonnet’s dock is the second Thunderbolt 5 docking station I’ve tested, and the first with an integrated SSD. The integrated SSD drives up the cost substantially, but its performance sits well above a conventional external SSD. (Intel’s original reference design included an integrated SSD, my contacts say, so some manufacturers followed suit.) It’s a smart decision, nevertheless, and one that is a killer selling point for this laptop docking station.

Sonnet’s dock measures about 8.5 inches long and about 3.75 inches deep, and is slightly thicker than an inch. There is no option to mount it vertically. The dock is made of plastic, with what appears to be venting on the top and sides.

On the front of the dock is a power button, with LEDs signaling power and an active Thunderbolt connection. The power button needs to be held down for a second or two to turn the dock on and off.

Sonnet clearly labeled both front ports: a 140W Thunderbolt 5 port that connects via a 31-inch Thunderbolt 5 cable, as well as a second, 60W Thunderbolt 5 port. On the front is a 10Gbps USB-A port, a UHS-II SD and microSD card slot, and a headphone jack. On the rear of the dock are two more Thunderbolt 5 ports, two more 10Gbps USB-A ports (and a 5Gbps USB-A port, too), and an RJ45 connector for up to 2.5Gbit Ethernet.

Mark Hachman / Foundry

Unfortunately, given the price of the dock, there are no dedicated HDMI or DisplayPort ports, which may require you to purchase additional cables. On the other hand, my 4K, 160Hz test displays support high-speed USB-C inputs, and if you’re in the market for such a dock, yours might as well. Remember, Thunderbolt 4’s base spec supports two 4K displays at 60Hz; Thunderbolt 5 supports three 4K, 144Hz displays. In this case, I simply reused existing 40Gbps Thunderbolt 4 cables.

Two of my test displays reliably connected at 4K, 144Hz resolution, but not three. (The dock sent content to all three 4K displays, at 144Hz — but just two at a time.)

Given the issues I had with this same laptop and a Kensington dock, I suspected that my test laptop might be the issue. At press time, there were virtually no Thunderbolt 5 laptops to test with; after consultation with Sonnet’s engineers and other sources, I’ve concluded that the laptop’s Thunderbolt 5 controller may be split between the two ports. That won’t allow the laptop to display on three external 4K144 displays, even if the dock allows it. I’ll be updating my test laptop as soon as I can.

Mark Hachman / Foundry

Note that while this dock is backwards-compatible with a Thunderbolt 4 laptop, you’ll receive the best value using Thunderbolt 5 hardware. Sonnet notes that the slower Thunderbolt 4 I/O connection will throttle the SSD, which is a key selling point for this dock.

Integrating an SSD offers benefits as well as concerns

As someone who typically leaves a USB key plugged into the dock to serve as a “sneakernet” of sorts, the idea of having dedicated storage in a dock appeals to me. Sonnet ships this dock with either a 1TB, 2TB, or 4TB SSD inside; my review unit had a 2TB SSD.

You’d never know it, though. My review unit came with the drive in an unformatted state, meaning that it didn’t show up in File Explorer and essentially didn’t “exist” as far as my PC was concerned. Sonnet’s original documentation said nothing about this, and even an updated version that the company sent electronically barely mentioned it or what to do.

It’s not hard to search for how to solve this problem; using Windows’ own search tool and looking for “create and format hard disk partitions” brings up the Disk Management window under the Windows Control Panel. That tool shows the unformatted drive, which you can right-click on to format and make the drive usable. A Thunderbolt dock, however, is essentially plug-and-play, and formatting an external SSD most decidedly is not. I’d recommend that Sonnet either pre-format the drive or include a dedicated, detailed tutorial on how to do so.

Mark Hachman / Foundry

The drive is not encrypted by default, though it is surrounded by the dock itself and is not designed to be user-accessible. Windows does provide drive encryption, known as BitLocker, though that’s a feature that’s exclusive to Windows 10/11 Pro. (A Windows 10/11 Home machine can access a BitLocker-encrypted external SSD via a dedicated password that must be typed in.) If you don’t encrypt the embedded SSD, that means that there’s a drive that anyone can access just by docking their laptop. Could someone malicious plant spyware or malware on it? Possibly.

A portable SSD can also be picked up and carried with you, or secured elsewhere. This isn’t an argument for or against Sonnet’s dock! But it is a list of things to think about if you’re considering buying it.

Sonnet does claim that the integrated SSD, connected via Thunderbolt 5, will be faster than an SSD connected to your PC via USB. And boy, is it ever.

Sonnet Echo 13 Thunderbolt 5 SSD Dock: Performance

My earlier experience with the Kensington SD5000T5 EQ Thunderbolt 5 Triple 4K Docking Station, the first TB5 dock I’d tested, was a huge bust. At the time, I didn’t feel confident in trying to assign blame, since I was working with a new laptop, new cables, and a new dock. For this testing, I used the same Maingear laptop (with a 14th-gen Core HX chip and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 GPU) that I did for that previous test.

My experience with the Sonnet dock was far better, and what I’d expect from the Thunderbolt 5 experience.

Mark Hachman / Foundry

Stability-wise, the Echo 13 demonstrated a decent amount of what I call “display bounce.” Plugging a laptop into the dock — which was already connected to a pair of 4K, 144Hz displays — produced a situation where the displays flipped off and on and realigned themselves for a few seconds. That’s not particularly unusual.

After that, everything settled down, all the displays remained connected, and the performance was smooth and pretty stable, as you’d expect. But there were several times that the dock struggled to light one display after resuming from sleep, and rarely (once every couple of days) one display disconnected for a second, resumed, and continued normally. (Powering the dock on and off solved this.) I suspect that this was the laptop’s fault. The SSD remained accessible at all times.

The dock is rated to supply 140W of output power to a laptop. While my test laptop, Maingear’s ML-17, supports Thunderbolt 5, it can’t accept the 140W of power the dock theoretically provides. (Dell’s latest workstation-class laptops do, though I do not have one to test.) So while I can’t confirm how much maximum power the dock can provide over the Thunderbolt cable, it did provide 78W over the main TB5 connection, and 56W (out of a rated 60W) via the other front Thunderbolt connection. That’s just fine to fast-charge a smartphone.

(Note that the 85W passed via the Thunderbolt 5 cable will not be sufficient to charge gaming laptops, such as the first few with Thunderbolt 5 connections. You’ll still need to charge those devices via their dedicated chargers.)

During my streaming tests, where I stream a 4K, 60Hz video over the internet via the Ethernet cable, everything went perfectly — the dock dropped 6 out of 10,000 frames, which is negligible. I did notice a little judder from simultaneously playing a second video on a second display, which I normally didn’t do. But YouTube didn’t note any dropped frames, so that might have been an issue with the GPU.

But the storage performance is revelatory. Sonnet describes the internal SSD’s speed as “ridiculous” and this is one of the few times I’d agree with the marketing copy. Ludicrous speed, even!

I check SSD speeds by connecting a standard SSD to the dock’s USB-C port and running PCMark 10’s external benchmark, which reports the transfer data in megabytes per second as well as an abstract score. To date, the very best scores I’ve ever seen are about 135MB/s, with a score of 850 or so. Directly connected to the laptop, my test SSD delivers 160MB/s and a score of 1,042.

Sonnet’s Echo 13 Thunderbolt 5 SSD Dock delivered data to the laptop at 279.8MB/s for a score of 1,891. That’s a 75 percent increase in pure throughput! Put another way, when testing the drive using CrystalDiskMark 8.0, sequential read performance was 3,977MB/s, almost double the read performance of 2,036MB/s from the Lexar SL600, an external 20Gbps SSD.

I also simply copy a folder of raw multimedia files from the SSD to the desktop. All of these tests are pushing this data through the dock’s internal circuitry over the Thunderbolt 5 cable. About the best score I’ve seen is 1 minute, 2 seconds, tacking on an additional 4 more seconds if I’m streaming video during the copy process. Sonnet’s Echo 13 copied the files in 13.9 seconds, or 14.2 seconds while streaming. That’s a 78 percent decrease in the time taken by that test alone!

It’s worth noting that I still connected my traditional test SSD to the dock’s USB-C port, and here Sonnet’s dock wasn’t nearly as impressive: 106.2 MB/s, or a score of 682. That’s lower than the competition, if you decided not to use the internal SSD.

Throughout all of that, the dock was as cool as the other side of the pillow — quite literally. It didn’t even warm to the touch, probably because it sounds like it has a quiet, active fan cooling the dock.

Should you buy the Sonnet Echo 13 Thunderbolt 5 SSD Dock?

The integrated SSD is a significant cost adder, and not necessarily worth it if your storage needs are already served.

On the other hand, the performance of the dock’s SSD certainly makes up for it. A premium Thunderbolt dock plus the price of a 2TB SSD works out to about $450, which isn’t too much less than what Sonnet is charging.

In general, this dock did everything I’ve asked it to do. I’m still struggling with a test bed that can adequately measure the power a Thunderbolt 5 dock provides, and I’m pretty sure that the dock’s inability to output to three 4K/144 displays (as opposed to just two) may be the fault of the laptop, not the dock. We already know that not much Thunderbolt 5 hardware is available.

Otherwise, I’m extremely pleased with the Sonnet Echo 13 Thunderbolt 5 SSD Dock and would recommend it even in the current state of the market and at its current price. Sonnet’s Echo 13 offers both amazing performance and reliable stability, and sets the bar for other ultrapremium Thunderbolt 5 docks to trail in its wake. Others will follow, certainly. But right now, Sonnet’s dock is the best I’ve ever tested.