Dell WD19TB Thunderbolt Docking Station with 180W AC Power Adapter (130W Power Delivery)

As of this writing, Ive only used the WD19TB for a few days, but its doing everything I want it to do. I previously had a Dell WD15 dock that broke after a year or two. I then bought a Dell 6000 dock, which I promptly returned to Amazon (without any issues) because the 6000 doesnt have an on/off switch. When I first installed the Wd19TB dock, it didnt work properly. I checked online and realized that the drivers on my Dell laptop needed to be updated as Dell has released new drivers for Thunderbolt within the past 6 months. After I updated all of the relevant drivers, the dock worked as advertised, and its still working. I gave this dock 4 stars instead of 5 stars because the USB-C Thunderbolt cable is permanently attached to the dock, just like the Thunderbolt cable on the WD15 dock I used to use. One of the problems I had with the WD15 dock was that the plastic pieces at the end of the USB-C Thunderbolt cable broke, so I taped them back together with electrical tape (as I could not replace the permanently-attached cable without throwing away the dock). I would prefer the Thunderbolt cable not be permanently attached to the dock so I could swap cables if the Thunderbolt cable on the WD19TB breaks like the cable on the WD15 broke.

Does not seem to be designed by people who might actually use it. Most annoying, the thunderbolt cable comes out of the left of the dock and the DELL laptops that I have all have the Thunderbolt port on the left... so no matter what you do, the cable has to wrap around the dock or wrap around the laptop, in which case it is barely long enough. Also, this needs a USB hub to go with it, as it only has 2 USB3.0 ports, one in the front and one in the back. Unless this has changed recently, DELL laptops need driver updates to support Thunderbolt, so this does not work out-of-the-box.

While the product pricing is quite allot more than I wanted to spend but others I have tried were unstable.

Upon reconnecting and/or restarts, this docking station does not reliably communicate with the Dell devices it was designed for. You may find a pattern of interacting with your device that temporarily resolves this problem, but your pattern may stop working at anytime, and its very likely to stop working upon installing an update (which occurs pretty frequently with the new platforms this was designed for). This is an annoying time-sink that undermines the sense of being able to simply grab-and-go / plug-and-play that many laptop users likely expect when connecting to this docking station. Aside from that unfortunately overshadowing issue, the docking station works well, its stark design is appealing and its ports are sensibly arranged *around* the device, and the build quality is good.

I ordered the WD19TB that has the audio connector. What I received was the WD19TBS which is the updated version where they removed the audio connector. As far as I could find to read on the differences, the absence of the audio connector is the only difference. So now I was thinking I would have audio connected with my dock, which is very important to me, and do not because the item I got is not what is described. The item even looks different, of course.

Bought this docking station to increase the available ports and to utilize multiple monitors. Had it for a couple of weeks and it has not disapointed at all.

So far it works as expected.

It works

I was surprised that this worked perfectly with no fuss in Linux (Arch). I was able to plug in the dock and it immediately worked with all 3 1440 monitors I have. USB, network, and power all work too.

The onboard ethernet adapter (Realtek USB GbE Family Controller) becomes effectively disabled at least 3/4 days out of each week. I have to go into the adapter settings and tweak the following attributes EACH time. - Adaptive Link Speed = Enabled - Energy-Efficient Ethernet = Disabled - Green Ethernet = Disabled - Speed & Duplex = 1.0 Gbps Full Duplex (auto-negotiation really should work here) Essentially, the settings revert back to defaults and this is the only fix. Rebooting does not resolve this. Simply clicking Enable does not resolve this. Note that Dell has published a similar issue (Article Number: 000132644) related to Flow Control. My issue is NOT related to this, because, as you can see above, I never have to tweak the Flow Control setting.