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Dynadock: The almost docking station

It works well and exposes the idiosyncrasies of USB peripherals

Figure 1. Setting up the Dynadock. (Photo: JPR)

This week we’re testing a nifty little 2001 A Space Odyssey–looking monolithic device from Toshiba called Dynadock. The concept is amazingly clever: simply plug it into a USB 2.0 socket on your laptop (or desktop for that matter), and you’re done. Plugged into the Dynadock is your RJ45 CAT5 Ethernet cable, your DVI second monitor, your optical S/PDIF and/or 3-mm stereo jack, and whatever other (up to six) USB devices you use (e.g., keyboard, mouse, disks, etc.).

Is that a great idea or what? An official HP docking station for my machine (nw8240) is $280, and if you shop around you can find them for as low as $170. The Toshiba Dynadock lists for $150 and can be found for as low as $140 ($134 with VGA), so if the Dynadock does what it advertises then it’s a good deal money-wise as well as convenience and adding extra USB ports and a S/PDIF audio port.

I was anxious to test the high-res (1600 ¥ 1200) DVI DisplayLink converter in it. I had been using a USB-to-VGA module from DisplayLink, and although it did the job, I didn’t think I was getting all the quality that I could be out of my expensive 21-inch monitor.

The hookup was easy and the monitor (on the right in Figure 1, above) does look better.

Alas, it isn’t that easy.

The Dynadock does do what it advertises, but not as straightforwardly as desired—at least not in my case.

I have a mouse, two external displays, and two external disk drives, a Maxtor and a cute little HP Pocket Media Drive (which we wrote about in the October 30 issue). The Maxtor has its own power supply, whereas the HP relies on USB power.

The Dynadock has two USB connectors on the front panel and four on the rear panel. To hide cables I connected the mouse and drives to the rear USB ports. But when I boot up, the HP drive never gets enabled. Hmmm.

The instructions describe the two front-panel USB ports as “powered,” but they don’t specifically say that about the rear four ports. So I plugged the HP drive into the front, and rebooted a few times, and the HP was happy—but I wasn’t, because now I had a cable sticking out the front and I had lost the convenience of a front-access USB port to download the pictures of PowerPoint slides from my camera.

OK, so I lost a port, not the end of the world.

In my system configuration, I have one monitor (the left one) connected to the VGA output connector on the rear of the laptop. However, before the Dynadock came I had the monitor on the right connected to my laptop with a DisplayLink USB-to-VGA module—that module was now surplus. So, what if I used it for the left monitor? That would be one less connection I’d have to make and would really make the Dynadock a one-stop one-plug operation. So I tried it. It worked, but like the HP drive, it too required a powered USB port, and guess where the only other one was—on the front panel. Sigh.

However, the good news is that it worked. And to compensate for the lost front-panel ports I connected a powered USB expansion hub to one of the rear panel ports. Unfortunately, that doesn’t satisfy the powered USB port requirements of the HP disk or the DisplayLink module (there’s powered USB and then there’s powered USB, you see).

Figure 2. The Dynadock nestled between the left monitor and the laptop with USB and audio socket available in the front. (Photo: JPR)

What do we think?

When I would come home from a trip I would have to plug in the CAT5 cable, a USB cable for my USB extender, the HP drive (because it’s so damn particular), my audio jack for the Creative speaker system, and the VGA cable for the monitor on the left. Now with the Dynadock I can just plug in one USB cable and I’m done.

What the Dynadock does, besides making my coming and going here at Mount Tiburon Testing Labs more convenient, is expose the peculiarities of USB devices, things the manufacturers seem to forget to tell you—like this device requires a powered USB connection.

And so I can’t really have the nice neat arrangement shown in picture in Figure 2; instead I’ve had to shove the Dynadock behind the monitor, and now next to the Creative box to the left I have a USB hub for my camera and phone and whatevers.

We think the Dynadock is certainly a winner, reasonably priced, and extremely convenient.

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