Satechi’s USB-C hub can hold an SSD if you have more money than ports

Well-known hub maker Satechi has released a new dongle that combines additional ports and a slot for an M.2 SATA SSD to expand both I / O and your computer’s storage while taking up only one of the your precious ports. It doesn’t come with an SSD, but it does have a catchy name: the Satechi USB-C Hybrid Multiport Adapter. The concept has been made by lesser-known brands before, but if you’re now considering Satechi making one, maybe wait a moment as we break down the caveats and potentially better options.

As a hub, it’s pretty standard and flawless: it has a 100W USB-C PD passthrough (which will provide your computer with around 85W after taking in the power it needs to operate), two ports USB-A 3.0 and an HDMI port capable of driving a 4K 60Hz display. Then, of course, there’s the M.2 port to add a SATA SSD of almost any size.

Image: Satechi

The main problem with Satechi’s new hub is the value proposition: at $ 90, it’s an expensive hub (although I found Satechi’s aluminum designs to be very nice, if that’s the kind of thing for which you like to spend money on). But even at that price, it doesn’t come with an M.2 SSD. Unless you have one that floats, you’ll have to shell out even more money to use this hub’s defining feature.

For just $ 10 more, you can get Anker’s PowerExpand, which includes USB-A ports, HDMI port, USB-C PD relay, and 256GB of onboard storage. Of course, you don’t have the option of putting in a bigger SSD, but it’s significantly cheaper than Satechi’s option once you factor in the extra cost of buying an M SSD. .2 separate. You can also just buy one of Satechi’s other hubs (which adds SD and microSD card slots) and a 256GB flash drive, and you’d be pretty close to the price of the hybrid USB-C multiport adapter alone.

Of course, a flash drive will be much slower than an SSD – at least that would be under ordinary circumstances. This is the second big caveat with Satechi’s new hub, however: you can only access the SSD at USB 3.0 speeds, which means 5 Gbps. This will severely limit the performance of even the SATA SSDs supported by the hub. (Satechi’s site says you can’t use NVMe drives.) If you need a fast external SSD, you should probably use a dedicated external SSD – and if you don’t, you should probably just get a cheaper flash drive.

Image: Satechi

It seems like this product is hard to recommend unless you have absolutely no ports – maybe if you own that MacBook that has only flipped a single USB-C port (or, more realistically, an iPad Pro or Air), and you need to expand your storage, this is for you. It can also come in handy if you’re an IT tech who spends all day pulling discs out of laptops and want an all-in-one solution for reading and plugging them in. For everyone else, however, this is a difficult product to recommend. Hope some of our other suggestions will suit you well.