Sonnet's Latest Thunderbolt 4 Dock Features Internal SSD Enclosure

Sonnet this week announced its latest Thunderbolt 4 dock, the Echo 20, and one of its key features is an internal enclosure for an M.2 NVMe SSD. This allows the dock to double as an external storage drive for a Mac.

Sonnet Echo 20 Thunderbolt 4 Dock
Accessible from the bottom of the dock, the enclosure can hold up to an 8TB SSD and supports data transfer speeds up to 800 MB/s, according to Sonnet.

The dock is also equipped with an upstream Thunderbolt 4 port that provides up to 100W of pass-through charging to a connected Mac, two downstream Thunderbolt 4 ports, four USB-C ports with up to 10 Gbps speeds, four USB-A ports with up to 10 Gbps speeds, one HDMI 2.1 port, one 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet port, one 3.5mm combo audio jack, one 3.5mm microphone jack, left and right RCA line out jacks, and one SD card slot.


The dock is designed for use with devices equipped with Thunderbolt ports, including all of Apple's latest Mac and iPad Pro models, providing expanded connectivity for external displays, USB accessories, and other peripherals.

The Echo 20 is available to order on Sonnet's website for $299.99 in the United States and will be available at additional retailers soon. The dock has an external power supply and ships with a 0.7-meter Thunderbolt 4 cable in the box. Sonnet has a similar Thunderbolt dock that supports dual SSDs for up to 16TB of storage, but it has fewer ports.

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Top Rated Comments

tan.shu Avatar
29 months ago
why only 800 MB/s?
Score: 20 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Rychiar Avatar
29 months ago
ya lost me at 800mbps:confused: who would pay for that? my current external NVME gets 3000+ mb/s. like why even be thunderbolt 4 and cap it there...
Score: 12 Votes (Like | Disagree)
6787872 Avatar
29 months ago
would this gracefully be able to eject or require manual ejection every time you want to unplug from the dock?
Score: 7 Votes (Like | Disagree)
bradman83 Avatar
29 months ago

why only 800 MB/s?
I would venture a guess it’s because it has to share bandwidth with other functions of the dock (display bandwidth especially), whereas a dedicated Thunderbolt enclosure has that 40 Gbps all to itself.
Score: 7 Votes (Like | Disagree)
wesley96 Avatar
28 months ago
It is likely that this product’s controller chip is dedicating one of the four PCIe lanes available for Thunderbolt 3 / 4 connectivity to the SSD slot. TB3/4 is effectively an externalized PCIe 3.0 x 4, with each lane providing 10Gbps bandwidth. Since there are several protocol overheads including 8b/10b encoding for data, it’s easy to see the 10Gbps dwindle to 800MB/s max throughout.

BTW, the tech specs say that it uses the M.2 NVME SSDs, not the MSATA variety. so the limit is not due to SATA3’s 6Gbps max bandwidth. The SSDs using that standard maxes out at ~550MB/a anyway.
Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)
pmasters Avatar
29 months ago
$300 is way overpriced, especially for the weak ass speeds.
Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)