Before I kick off with my review, I’d like to point out that there are indeed TWO different Ugreen Mac Mini docking stations that look very similar, but they have a couple of notable differences. I have been sent, am using and am reviewing for you here today the version that doesn’t have a Displayport, it has USB-C and USB-A ports.
Thanks to Ugreen for shipping the dock out to us for review!
Remember when the Mac Mini M4 was first announced? People all over the world (On Reddit) were totally losing their minds about the fact that the power button was at the back on the underside of the miniscule computer, thousands (ok, maybe 15) of people (On Reddit!) all outraged… Well, at the time I had a 2019 iMac that was barely keeping up with the modern day load of apps I ran on it (Photo and Video editing stuff can be pretty CPU-sucking!) The poor old thing was taking about 15 minutes to boot.. Skip forward, my Mac Mini M4 arrives and it’s faster than my three younger brothers at a Smorgies all you can eat (you’re THIS old if you can remember them!) and you know what, the power button wasn’t an issue!
One thing I did find to be a little problematic early on was ports, or the lack of – now, in general use, I guess the little Mac has all the ports a regular person could need, three usb-c ports, a full sized HDMI port, a network port and that’s about it. You do also get two extra usb-c ports on the front as well as a headphone jack (grrr, more on that later)
I run a couple of external drives, two monitors, a webcam and that’s all the ports on the back of the computer full, I started hanging any extra peripherals out the front of the Mac Mini, but I quickly found that the bus power would support two drives, a monitor, webcam and ANYthing else without giving me the “we don’t have enough power, disconnect your USB-whatever and try again” (or whatever it says… I don’t recall because…)
Ugreen sent over their (wordy) UGREEN Mac mini M4 Docking Station with NVMe SSD and that solved, thus far, all of my issues! So, while the Ugreen takes one of your USB-C ports to connect itself to your Mac, and you also lose another if you inject power into the dock to help support your full load of peripherals (which I have done with a random 5V output power supply and a gutsy Tethertools USB-C cable) and I’ve not had an over-draw on USB power since!
So effectively, I have five extra USB-A ports, three of them 10Gbps speed, two of them 5Gbps speed, I have an extra 10Gbps USB-C port (after you take one away for the uplink) The Mac Mini rear ports are Thunderbolt 4, so they’re super-quick, and as such I run my main external drive out of one of them, unfortunately (and I may be doing something wrong) but I must run the external monitor (USB-C) from the Mac, it won’t work when plugged into the slower USB-C of the dock, which is a shame as I’m pretty sure it doesn’t need all the oomph of the Thunderbolt 4 port! Still, I have all the ports I need and then some.
The “Then Some” comes in the form of the SD and MicroSD slots on the front of the dock, while they’re very handy, if I might offer a little feedback, can we get the sharp edges around the entrance to those ports rolled over? My SD cards are expensive and I don’t want to scrape them while pulling and pushing 😳 That said, they work well enough for general use – by general use I mean if you’re importing a handful of images from an SD card or maybe a file or two off a MicroSD card from a drone or GoPro, the ports run at around 90mbps compared to using a card-reader in the ‘slow’ ports on the front of the Mac that run at about 250Mbps – I tested this using BlackMagicDesign’s Disk Speed Test. Not a deal breaker, this is typical of on-dock card readers, but as I said – if you’re not importing hours of 4K footage, they’re fine for general use.
The UGREEN Mac mini M4 Docking Station with NVMe SSD ALSO has a handy slot for a (as it says in the name) little stick of NVMe SSD memory, and, as it happens, I had one sitting around and so, upon setup I inserted the diminutive stick into the top of the dock using the included screwdriver and also applying the small slab of heat dissipator (what’s that stuff actually called?) on the SSD and have found it very handy to have as a mid-way between my desktop and that place saved files go to die! (I need to have an eClean Out I tell ya!) I had read that a handful of people have run into problems with heat while using other docks in the same manner, I’ve not had that issue and my Mac is pretty much left on 24/7 and used for most of each day.
The SSD appears to run at around 855Mbps read and 777Mbps write speeds pretty consistently. This is certainly slower than it could potentially run for a Gen 4 NVMe SSD, but as it’s running in a dock as a spare bit of space, the speed isn’t really that crucial – I’d suggest if you’re looking for speed for a specific job (lots of 4K video etc) you’d likely get a dedicated tool for that job.
Above you can see the little memory-door on the base of the Ugreen Dock, and below you can see my fat fingers slotting in the little stick of WD memory goodness.
Aside from the sharp edges on some of the ports that I mentioned above, I really wish, like the DisplayPort version, that this dock moved the headphone jack to the rear, you can see on the front of my Mac in the first photo on this post, and below, that I have a dirty great TRS to RCA cable coming out, that runs to my powered monitors (I like music ok!) and I’ve not found another cable that has one TRS plug to split RCA cables that will accommodate this setup, that’s fine! But if that jack was at the back of this dock, like it is in the DisplayPort version, I’d be in dock-heaven (Is that even a place?) But, it’s not, so I’m not, but that’s ok… You can’t win ’em all!
I saved the worst for last in this case – Here’s how it started! (Already had a cheeky Ugreen HDMI cable in there) full ports at the back as well as an extra out the front, with the inclusion of this new dock, I have ports to spare and a much neater, more functional setup.
All in all, this is a great unit that does everything that it purports to do, as well as….allows you access to the power button without having to lift your Mac off the desk! I’d call that a win – try one out for yourself.
The Ugreen Mac Mini docking station has a RRP of A$155.99, but is discounted on Amazon at time of publish to $76.79.
DRN would like to thank Ugreen for providing the review unit.
