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Well, more accurately Daisy bought me the Hagibis dock for Christmas and I totally forgot about it until I moved my desk upstairs to my new office. So what is the Hagibis dock, other than something Safari keeps trying to autocorrect to “Haggis”?
It’s a USB-C dock that’s made to sit under your Mac Studio and provides extra ports and, in the case of this particular one, a space for either a SATA drive or an NVMe M.2 drive or both.
On the front, you get three USB A 3.0 ports, an SD Card reader and a MicroSD card reader, a USB C port, and then around back there are two USB C ports for connecting it to the computer and optionally power.
I was initially torn as to whether I should spend the extra money for the faster NVMe drive over the SATA, but when I checked prices online, the NVMe drive only cost $10 more. That made my choice a lot easier. I went with the Samsung 970 Evo Plus NMVe M.2. It has good reviews and a good reputation for reliability and speed.
Installation is very straightforward. There’s a door on the bottom of the dock that has a space for either the SATA drive or NVMe drive. You basically just stick the drive in there. There’s a little rubber plug that holds the SSD chip in place so it doesn’t flop around.
After that you just put the door on. I did put the screws in though I doubt it’s really a big deal since this isn’t really made to ever be moved. I put the screws in so I can have to go find a tiny screwdriver later. It’s just a fun game I like to play.
After I got everything set up, it was time to do some disk speed tests. The Samsung 970 in the Hagibis dock did pretty much exactly what I expected. It was significantly slower than the on-board SSD in my M1 Pro Mac Studio, but literally more than 10x faster than my USB external HDD.
Overall, pretty happy with this setup right now. It seems to work exactly as advertised, it’s a slick way to add a bunch of fast-ish storage to your Mac mini or Mac Studio, and all-in including the Samsung SSD, this setup was under $200.
Update – So far I have found one small issue. For some reason the SD card reader on it doesn’t seem to like the SD Card I use in my X-S20. I’m gonna do more testing and see if it’s an issue with the dock or an issue with the card.
I don’t honestly care that much because I have a Mac Studio and it has a card reader built in, but I would definitely be annoyed if I bought this for a Mac mini.
