Port authority: Belkin Thunderbolt 2 Express Dock

Costly connectedness with 4K support

Plug and play

Performance depends entirely on your peripherals. I used two test data sets, one containing just MP3 and AAC music files, and the other a more typical "office" set of over 25,000 documents. First off, this is not peak Thunderbolt performance: I was using a Mirrored RAID backup drive,and you'll get higher numbers from a regular configuration, or a Striped RAID set. But it is a typical "real life" work out.

Compared against an older Thunderbolt 1 specced drive, I wasn't surprised not to find a great performance bump. In fact, it's near as makes no difference. However it did offer a small improvement in two of the tests.

Thunderbolt 2 Real World I/O tests

The good news is that the Belkin Thunderbolt 2 Express Dock offers no performance hit over a direct connection, and performs brilliantly under stress. By stress I ran a 720p HD YouTube video on an external HD telly, and streamed music over the Ethernet connection, while running the same tests. I didn't experience any dropouts from the video or audio streams, and in two tests, the stressed Hub outperformed the Hub carrying dedicated I/O to my drive. Nice.

The Hub remains warm to the touch, but not so warm you worried about a fire risk.

Belkin finally concedes to include a cable in the box – which was missing from the previous model

The Reg Verdict

As AnandTech explains, Intel refused to allow the PC motherboard industry to hook Thunderbolt to the host PC, but made an exception for Apple. Like Firewire, as far as mass adoption goes, Thunderbolt 2 is largely unique to Macs. All said, Thunderbolt remains a luxury item. There's no escaping the fact that £200 is a lot to pay for a one socket connection to all your devices and peripherals... apart from the FireWire ones, of course. ®