Sabrent DS-UICA USB-C Universal Docking Station

To Call This a Piece of Junk is an Insult to Pieces of Junk

I bought two of these; one for my office at work, one for my home office. The one I put at my home office was immediately troublesome and unreliable, effectively crashing my laptop with forced restarts as it (digitally, not physically) disconnected from the power supply cable, which apparently also carries every other signal path to the oversized hub. Eventually, most of the time but not all of the time, it settles down after about three crashes but, naturally, whenever you’re in the middle of a Zoom call or other clutch need, bam! Out like a light. I know it’s silly to anthropomorphize a piece of tech, but I swear this thing knows when it’s crunch time and that’s when it chooses to give out. I frequently need to just disconnect and use my tiny laptop [screen], which destroys my efficiency since I rely upon two monitors to work effectively. As for the one at work, it was usually reliable, for about five months or so, only infrequently zapping out. But, over the last week or two, it has, without warning, simply stopped recognizing its USB connections, a simple mouse and keyboard, requiring me to disconnect then reconnect them, which only works in correcting the situation about half the time. The other times, I need to do a full restart on my laptop, unplug and replug the power supply to the hub, and hope for the best upon restart. It usually takes two or three attempts to get it humming again. I was thinking about getting in touch with B&H’s customer support, to ask them to sell me one at cost to make up for my error in not registering this item with the manufacturer, so I could get one at home that is more reliable. But now, not seeing much point in this, since now neither of the two I purchased works consistently. Avoid this product at all costs unless you love aggravation and interruptions to your daily workflow.