WD19TB first impressions

As I was just reading the WD19DC post, I was inspired to post a bit of feedback for another of the new dock generations.

I am using the WD19TB as the main power supply for a Precision 5540, I have the usual suspects (network, keyboard, wireless mouse) connected to the dock, a 4K Benq display is connected via Displayport, and a LaCie Big6 Raid array via the docks Thunderbolt 3 connection.

Coming from the Mac world, I suffered through some of the worst thunderbolt/usb-c docks that were ever build. Price of being early adopters I guess.

In this regard the Dell dock surprised me very positively. It charges the 5540 over it's one Thunderbolt connector (I was assuming due to the power demands that I have a normal power chord for energy and a thunderbolt connection). And the dock is so far completely stable in use, after updating to the latest drivers.

No keyboard problems, no monitor flickerings, no "hardware takes forever to get detected" after a redocking of the laptop, or a reboot.

The dock has, imo, not enough ports (2 or 3 thunderbolt 3 ports would have been nicer to connect displays and other peripherals in the future), but for my setup I can live with it.

The only problem is that, when you put the laptop to sleep, the thunderbolt port on the dock continues to communicate with the LaCie array, so the array is not going to sleep. Only workaround I found so far is to either shut the laptop of completely, disconnect the cable (doh, but that's not good), or hibernate the laptop. It's a minor annoyance, that hopefully will get fixed with a firmware update.

The WD19TB supplies 130W to dell laptops, which is fine for the 5540, not sure how much the big brother sucks in. I can recommend this dock, for that price point it's doing in above setup a great job.

Frank

 

7540 wants 180W and 7740 wants 210W, so a single-cable dock won't cut it. You can run one of these systems with a single-cable dock but it will throttle the CPU and GPU pretty heavily. (This is the same situation as with the 7X10 and 7X20 systems which only had one USB-C/Thunderbolt port.) For these systems you have to use a "DC" dock with a double connector, or otherwise just connect an AC adapter directly to the system in addition to the dock cable.

Anyway. Thanks for posting your feedback. We have a few WD19TB at the office as well for use with newer Latitude systems. I haven't had personal experience with one yet, but what I've been hearing is they work much better than the TB16 docks did.

 

Thanks for this addition, as I said, I was not sure if that dock is a fit for the larger versions, good to have it clarified here. But, if I read you correctly, the WD19TB should work for a 77xx if you add the normal power adapter to the laptop and connect it to the dock? just curious

Frank

 

Yes, it should work with Precision 7000 systems if you also connect an AC adapter directly to the system.