The one thing I miss about old docking stations is that they were basically a bunch of dumb wires. I've had to power cycle my Thunderbolt dock a couple of times because its software managed to hang itself.

I use a Dell Latitude with Thunderbolt docks and for the past two years I have had consistent problems with the Thunderbolt dock in one location, while in the other location I frequent the Thunderbolt dock has been rock solid. In the problematic location I have gone through three different Dell TB16 docks despite staying current with device driver updates, and finally gave up on the TB16 model and went with a D6000 which has been stable since its installation.

That's definitely a thing in some configurations. I had a T580 that really didn't like Lenovo's own dock under Fedora 29. Smooth sailing with every other machine I've tried, though.

Because I can lock my laptop to the docking station, because it can also transfer power, and gives me access to many more ports than regular usb based docking station has.. and back in the good ol' days you could have a docking station with such ancient devices like cdrom and floppy - something that I don't need to carry around, but would be nice if I could access while sitting at my desk.

Lock your laptop to your desk, if you're so inclined.

My Lenovo TB3 dock has two DisplayPort outputs, two HDMI outputs, Gigabit, a 3.5mm jack, 5 USB3 ports, and a USB-C port. It can also daisy-chain Thunderbolt 3 to another high-bandwidth device; I haven't tried it with a PCIe dock or anything, but in that kind of extremity my X1 Extreme has a second TB3 port onboard anyway.

And USB-C PD can charge my X1 Extreme--not as fast as the dedicated 135W charger, but a less hungry laptop charges rapidly.

What more do you want? What are you missing?

USB-C transfers power as well.

Are you really using cds and floppies in the year of our lord 2020, or are you just strawmanning?

I use them quite often, as I work with a lot of legacy hardware and software.

I've got a USB DVD burner hooked up right now. Easy as falling off a log.

Burning cds/dvds is still a very convenient and dense affordable form of offline storage for backups and/or content hoarding.

Really? With the cost of SD cards what they are? Like, I can get a 128GB SD card for $30.

That would be 170 CD’s - nearly 30 DVD’s - which will eventually suffer disc rot.

DVD/CD write speeds are very slow, comparatively speaking to even USB 2.0 transfer speeds - and increasing the speed, in my experience, makes exact copies of discs extremely error-prone.

Explain how this is efficient? Genuinely curious, with the price of solid state storage these days.

(I understand even solid state storage has a shelf life, but at least it also can’t be so easily harmed as a CD/DVD)

SD cards are not intended for long-term archival purposes, not 10+ years. They don't go bad per se, but the data on them may not be readable after slowly discharging offline in cold storage for a decade or more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_rot#In_storage

How about bluray? 25GB for ~$0.70. Personally had so many sd cards, and even usb sticks fail that adding another type of storage as a backup for important files really makes a lot of sense.

A DVD holds, what? 14GB max?

A microSD card can hold 500GB. DVDs (and even blu-rays) are far from "dense".

They also require an order of magnitude longer to write, lose their data to bit rot faster than SLC flash, and require devices with mechanical motors for both reading and writing.

I wouldn't call them convenient compared to flash memory, and I'm surprised anyone would.

How long is SLC flash good for?

Archival quality optical discs are marketed as having a 300+ year lifespan.

I've never viewed SD cards as something appropriate for long-term offline storage, is SLC flash exceptional in this regard?

I was comparing the convenience of optical to tape, which is bulky and annoying, and in my experience quite unreliable.

Doesn't optical media degrade to the point of no longer being readable after a few years?

My personal experience has been surprisingly good even with cheap TDK CDRs I burned in the 90s still reading just fine decades later.

For especially valuable data you want to preserve for 100+ years, there are "archival quality" discs [0] [1].

[0] http://mam-a-store.com/goldcdr.html

[1] https://www.mediasupply.com/mamgold.html

These days, there are monitors with USB-C style ports that both deliver power to the laptop and accept display over the same cable. And they also connect that port with other downstream ports like HID/etc (presumably a USB optical or floppy drive would also work here).

I'll admit it's not quite as satisfying to plug in the cable, but it's still very functional and stable.

And most importantly: it's compatible with multiple brands instead of being a vendor lock in.

I think you need to take a second look at USB-C docking stations.

The one I use at work delivers power, has five USB-A ports, four monitor ports (pretty sure it doesn't support using all four at the same time, haven't tried) a thunderbolt port, and a headphone jack.

Minor thing: that'd be a Thunderbolt dock, not USB-C. And, funny enough, that is the biggest problem with USB-C: sometimes it's not actually USB-C!

Thunderbolt port on ThinkPads supports charging and any device - it's a PCIe bus after all.