RAYROW USB-C 4K Triple Display Docking Station and SSD Enclosure

It is those moments when you sit down to test something where every few moments you find yourself thinking “hey, it can do this too!”, that you start to develop a huge grin on your face. Finding something that works well is one thing, but when the features continue to flow from there, makes for a wonderful story.

That being said–how many times have you come across a USB-C hub that claims to play around with multiple monitors but never really delivers in the end? Sometimes it can do one but not two, or sometimes it can successfully pull off two monitors but you don’t get the promised 4K resolution (for those claiming to deliver full 4K)? Sadly, it happens a lot, making it hard to find a really good dock without having to make the upgrade to Thunderbolt 3 (TB3)–which is far superior, but more expensive.

Today, we have one that works. It isn’t perfect, few things are. However, this one delivers with a nice uppercut that will leave you doing backflips, since your setup will come together quite nicely. You just have to know how to make it properly work.  This is the RAYROW USB-C 4K Triple Display Docking Station and SSD Enclosure.

Like most of the newer USB-C solutions that are actually starting to work quite well, this one is capable of delivering two additional screens to your setup, including up to 4K. It can even give you a third additional display as long as you are ok with dropping to 1080p. Now, the 4K resolution with 2 screens is limited to 4K@30, but it is still 4K at least. For anything better, you’ll have to stick to a TB3 dock or wait for the new TB4 to come out (which looks so very promising).

The trick with these docks is you have to know how to make it all work. This dock will give you the extra display outs, multiple USB 3.0 ports, ethernet, and audio. If you are using a laptop with it, it can even charge that laptop as long as the model supports charging via its USB-C port. It just can’t do all of this right out of the box. This is the same with all of the “working” USB-C options we have seen thus far (for displays and charging). The mentioned “trick’ is to make use of a second power supply going into the dock. It comes with its own AC plug, but in order to also charge the laptop along with everything else going on, you have a second USB-C port on the dock that is used to handle power to the laptop. This needs to be plugged into another outlet.

If you don’t do that latter part, you can use the second USB-C port to charge a phone, but that’s it. So it goes both ways. You can use it to charge a phone or to draw more power to the dock by connecting a USB-C cable between it and a wall adapter (which then allows the original USB-C cable going to the laptop to also charge that laptop within the same cable). The catch here is that the wall adapter you use has to 1) support PD over USB-C, and 2) support enough wattage via a single USB-C port to sustain the requirements of your laptop (each model is different). If not, the laptop will charge slower, causing you to still (albeit slower) use the battery when connected.

So, in our example, we use one of our Dell laptops. The laptop’s power supply provides 65-watts to the laptop to charge it with. So, we got our hands on a USB-C wall adapter that supports PD over USB-C and enough wattage that it will be able to cover 65W (ours here covers 100W). We connected a USB-C cable (came with dock) between the laptop and the “Host” port of the dock (highlighted with blue in the above image). Then we took a USB-C cable and connected it between the “Power” port (highlighted with yellow in the above image) of the dock and the purchased wall adapter. The dock’s normal AC (barrel-type plug) connection is supplying power to the ports and displays. The USB-C “Power” cable is supplying power to the laptop.

So what is the point of this extra hoop you have to jump through (and again, all of these docks that can pull all of this off, feature the same handicap)? This allows you to make everything (including charging) work with your laptop using a single connection (the USB-C cable). Nothing else coming out of the laptop. This allows you to unplug and walk away, or come back and plug right in with one connection. Then you have everything running to your laptop in one single line. External drives, mice, keyboards, monitors, music accessories, drawing pads, internet, audio, AND charging. Whatever you connect to that dock, all passes to the laptop and charges it at the same time. Pretty neat eh?

Don’t want to buy into a wall adapter for adding charging to the mix with? That’s fine. This just means you have to now also use your laptop’s charger, making a second connection. It all comes down to how clean you want everything to look and how easy you want it to be to attach and detach each time.

What makes this specific dock even better, is the top opens up to reveal a SATA M.2 slot on the inside, allowing you to insert a SATA M.2 SSD stick in there for some sweet (and fast) external storage. Unfortunately for this one, the slot is limited to SATA, so you won’t be able to use any NVMe drives with it. They might have hit a limit with USB-C or they missed an awesome bonus opportunity there. Regardless, you at least get the SATA support and those drives can climb as high as around 550MB/s. So this is a nice added feature of this hub.

So everything you see in the above image (from the displays to the purple LED light strip running around the table) is connected to the dock. There is also a wireless keyboard and mouse attached but we removed them for the image. The laptop is fully running off the dock as it would if its own power supply was plugged in, and we have more connectivity if we need it. All going to a single USB-C cable plugged into the left side of the laptop (that little silver dash in the image). This project was a success. There is a 1TB SATA M.2 drive inserted into the dock for external storage and Ethernet running to it. Then the dock and everything running to it were neatly hidden behind the laptop, making for a great sample setup.

The only thing to keep in mind if you are looking to build a powerful workstation or gaming solution, using the USB-C port for additional displays will rely on your CPU to do all of the work vs a graphics card. So this will put a demand on the CPU, which can take away from resources you’d normally have for gaming. So you may find you can’t game with all of the same higher settings as you might be used to (when running multiple displays through USB-C).

Our Conclusion

So did we like this? Yes! It performs exactly how we had hoped it would and beats out some of the docks we have tried in the past (including some coming from major brands). It works quite well and provides enough power to go around (as long as we have the added wall adapter in the mix of things). The only thing we could have ever asked for was support for NVMe as well due to the price and the brand being non-recognizable compared to your big names–but I guess we will have to save that for the competition to have something to challenge with (or the TB3 solutions out there).

*Average price is based on the time this article was published

Additional Images:

Connectivity:

• 2 x HDMI ports
• 1x DP port
• 4 x USB 3.0 Type-A Ports
• 1 x USB 3.0 Type-C Port
• 1 x PD USB C Charging Port & 1 
• 1 x DC power port
• 1 x Type-C PC/Laptop Port
• 1 x SSD Enclosure (SATA M.2)
• 1 x Gigabit Ethernet Port & 1 *3.5mm Stereo Audio

What You Get In The Box:

• 1 x RAYROW USB-C Docking Station
• 1 x 36W(12V/3A) power adapter
• 1 x USB-C to USB-C cable
• 1 x Screw set (include a screwdriver)
• 1 x User manual

Are you a manufacturer or distributor that would like us to test something out for review? Contact us and we can let you know where to send the product and we will try it out.

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