Atomos USB-C 3.1 Powered Docking Station

Yes it is a must

Hello Piboon, yes, all of the Atomos USB Docking are buss powered.

USB-C 3.1, gen 1

Hello Cole, the MINI SSD's are still a standard SATA connector so yes you can use any SATA bay readers, pretty much.

The 3.1 is about 10% (NOT 10X) faster on sequential reads and sequential writes (the most meaningful measure if you're using best practices -- a freshly formatted disk to write then later read video files). For random reads/writes using high queue with high thread count, the numerical differences were meaningful (but may not show in practice for video work) and for random reads/writes using low queue and low thread count, a marginal difference is seen. Details follow. I ran CrystalDiskMark 7.0 using the same SSD (a Samsung EVO 850 480GB) with each dock (the ATOMDCK003 --USB A 3.0 and ATOMDCK004 --USB C 3.1) plugged directly into my HP Spectre laptop native ports. I used default settings, which produce 8 results (2 sequential read, 2 random read, 2 sequential write and 2 random write results, average of 5 tests for each result and using 1 GiB file size). The 3.1 was slightly faster on sequential reads and sequential writes -- 464 (8 queues, 1 thread) and 443 MB/s (1 queue, 1 thread) compared to 426 and 422 MB/s read speeds, and 465 (8 queues, 1 thread) and 438 MB/s (1 queues, 1 thread) compared to 431 and 429 MB/s write speeds. For random reads/writes using high queue with high thread count, -- 127 MB/s read vs. 24 MB/s -- call that a factor of 5, and 90 vs. 40 MB/s write speeds -- a bit more than a factor of 2 (32 queues, 16 threads for those numbers). For random reads and writes with 1 queue and 1 thread, the numbers were only marginally better for the 3.1 compared to the 3.0 (24 vs 22 read and 33 vs 27 write).