OWC Thunderbolt 5 Dock with Dual HDMI Introduced – Two HDMI 2.1 Ports, 140W Laptop Charging, Full-Speed Downstream Storage

by Johnnie BehiriToday

Subscribe to News - Accessories

OWC brought its new Thunderbolt 5 Dock with Dual HDMI to IBC 2026, a desktop dock that puts two HDMI 2.1 ports directly on the back so a pair of monitors connect without adapters, while a single Thunderbolt 5 cable also carries up to 140W of charging, a downstream Thunderbolt 5 port for fast storage, card readers, and a full set of USB ports. We sat down with OWC founder and CEO Larry O’Connor at the booth to go through the dock, and the conversation then turned to the question every storage buyer is asking right now: where are memory and drive prices heading?

The dock took home our CineD Best-of-Show Award for Camera Control and Accessories at IBC 2026, and it is the second half of the Thunderbolt 5 story we started with Larry at NAB, where he walked us through the Express 4M2 Ultra RAID enclosure. OWC’s Thunderbolt 5 range already includes the Envoy Ultra portable SSD, which won a CineD award at IBC 2024, and a first Thunderbolt 5 dock that shipped last year. The dual-HDMI model is the third dock in that family, and Larry said it exists for the same reason as the rest of the line: customers asked for it.

Why a dock with HDMI built in

Larry described the design as entirely customer driven and pointed to the things OWC says it prioritizes across its products, which are heat dissipation, correct power delivery, and enough weight that the dock stays put on a desk when several stiff HDMI and Thunderbolt cables are pulling on it. The practical goal, as he put it, is to remove unknowns from a working day: no displays dropping out, no devices disconnecting, and no hunting for the component that is causing a problem in the middle of a job. He said the dock is built to run a full day with every port loaded rather than to look good in a short benchmark.

The headline feature is the pair of HDMI 2.1 ports on the rear. According to OWC’s product page, each runs on its own dedicated controller, and on a Thunderbolt 5 host the dock supports two HDMI displays at up to 4K 240Hz or 8K 60Hz with DSC. A third display can be added through the downstream Thunderbolt 5 port at up to 6K 60Hz, and the company lists triple 4K at 144Hz for that configuration. Asked about maximum resolution per HDMI output, Larry said it depends on the host machine and its GPU, and spoke in terms of 6K, 5K, and 4K displays, so anyone planning a specific monitor pairing should check OWC’s per-host display tables before buying.

What Thunderbolt 5 changes for displays and data

The more interesting part of the conversation was about bandwidth. Thunderbolt 5 provides 80Gb/s bidirectional, with Bandwidth Boost taking it to 120Gb/s in one direction for display-heavy setups, and Larry’s point was that the video traffic no longer competes with storage. He said two 6K displays can be driven from the dock without touching the data bandwidth, whereas on Thunderbolt 4, plugging a single 4K display into a dock cut what was left for a storage device down to roughly 1,000 to 1,200MB/s.

With Thunderbolt 5, the dock leaves the full data path open for storage, and Larry put the practical ceiling at around 6,500 to 7,000MB/s sustained through the downstream port. OWC’s ThunderBlade X12 is the drive he used as the example, and OWC rates that unit at up to 6,600MB/s peak and 5,990MB/s sustained write. In his framing, connecting a couple of fast SSDs, the ThunderBlade, and two displays through one cable no longer means managing which device is allowed to be fast. He added that this is the case for a laptop user in particular, since the Thunderbolt 4 answer to the same problem was usually two docks and two ports, one for storage and one for video.

Backwards compatibility

The dock is not limited to Thunderbolt 5 hosts. Larry confirmed it works with Thunderbolt 4 machines, with the speed limited to what that connection can carry, and OWC’s compatibility list adds USB4, USB-C, and Thunderbolt 3 Macs. On the Mac side, he noted that any M4 Pro or later machine has Thunderbolt 5, so buying the dock ahead of a laptop upgrade is a reasonable path for anyone still on an older body. In practice, the two HDMI ports still work on a Thunderbolt 4 host, but OWC’s tables show the ceiling dropping to dual 4K at 60Hz and no third display in that case.

Ports, front and back

On the back, alongside the two HDMI outputs, there are USB-A ports at 5Gb/s and USB-C at 5Gb/s and 10Gb/s. The front carries the downstream Thunderbolt 5 port at 80Gb/s, two 10Gb/s USB-C ports, a USB-A port, a UHS-II SD slot, a microSD slot, and a 3.5mm audio jack that handles both headphones and an integrated microphone. OWC’s own spec sheet counts eight USB ports in total, five USB-C and three USB-A, plus a 2.5Gb Ethernet port for NAS and wired network work.

Larry’s example for the front Thunderbolt port was a shuttle drive such as the Envoy Ultra, which sustains over 6,000MB/s reads and a large portion of that on writes, plugged in without reaching around the back. On the USB-A ports, his position was simply that the connector is still everywhere, from security dongles to peripherals that cannot be replaced, so the dock keeps them. Charging to the host is up to 140W over the Thunderbolt 5 cable, which covers a 16-inch MacBook Pro under load, and the front USB-C port provides up to 30W for a phone or tablet according to OWC.

The storage price question

Because OWC builds and sells drives, we asked Larry for his read on the memory market, a subject we have been tracking since camera card manufacturers first warned us about NAND scarcity in late 2025, through Sony suspending most of its memory card sales, Blackmagic Design’s price increases, and Apple raising MacBook prices in June.

His summary was that demand is still very high, supply has become more consistent and steadier over the summer, and a little more balance has emerged between enterprise and client-side pricing, which helps at the margin without making the situation better overall. He named the handful of companies that actually fabricate NAND flash, Micron, Samsung, SanDisk, and Kioxia, with YMTC in China coming up behind them, and noted that whichever brand of drive you buy, the flash comes from one of those fabs.

The demand side is AI data centers, and Larry’s description was blunt: components are being bought for facilities that have not broken ground yet. A server rack needs over 900 components, and if one is missing, nothing gets deployed, so buyers are stockpiling everything they can against projected builds. His hope, which he labelled as possibly wishful thinking, is that some of that demand slows and leaves capacity for everyone else.

What that means at the checkout

The consumer effect, in his words, is almost criminal. He said there are effectively no sub-$100 tablets or phones for schools anymore because even a small amount of memory now costs too much to fit under that price. In the professional space, a 2TB drive today costs what a 4TB, and in some cases an 8TB, drive cost a year to eighteen months ago.

Hard drives have not escaped either. Larry said drive pricing was relatively stable until the start of the second quarter of this year, then rose again in the third quarter, and hard drive prices have roughly doubled in the last year. His example was a 24TB drive at $500 to $600 a year ago, now selling for $1,000 to $1,200. A high-performance 4TB SSD blade that was close to $200 a year ago is now $1,400 to $1,500, and a 24TB solid-state solution sits in the $6,000 to $7,000 range, so a doubled hard drive price still buys a lot of capacity by comparison.

That gap is why Larry argues SSDs had become artificially cheap, to the point where prices fell below the level that justifies new fabs, which is part of the shortage the industry is now paying for, and buyers stopped thinking about where solid-state was actually needed. With budgets under pressure, he said spinning-drive arrays such as OWC’s ThunderBay are being deployed in strong numbers again alongside SSD arrays where the workload requires them. He also flagged cheap SSDs without a DRAM cache, which offer a small fast portion, one or two percent of the drive in his estimate, and then fall to write speeds slower than a single spinning drive, the wrong behavior for a video workflow.

On-prem, Strada, and owning your data

The second half of OWC’s answer to expensive storage is to use it more efficiently. The company acquired OpenDrives on September 10, which Larry described as hybrid on-prem enterprise storage, and it made a strategic investment in Strada in December 2025. He placed Strada at the other end of the stack, serving small groups and individuals who want to share and even edit collaboratively from drives they keep locally. We have followed Strada closely, most recently with Michael Cioni’s Strada 2 first look at Cine Gear 2026 and Strada Connect at NAB 2026.

Larry’s example was a 30GB RAW file played back from a single ThunderBlade and shared with ten or twenty users doing proxy edits, without the cloud in the loop. His broader point was about cost: customers who drifted into paying $2,000 to $3,000 a month for a service like Dropbox are spending $24,000 a year, and a single on-prem solution with more capacity costs less than half of that, once. He recalled being told in an interview five years ago that direct-attached storage was obsolete and everything would move to the cloud, and said the same companies that pushed people up into the cloud are now helping them bring data back down. The cloud, in his view, is excellent for orchestrating data you own, but the shift he objects to is the mindset that you pay for access to your own files.

Price and availability

The OWC Thunderbolt 5 Dock with Dual HDMI is priced at $349.99 and, per Larry at the show, will begin shipping in about a month, which OWC’s product page lists as November. It ships with a certified 1m (3.3ft) OWC Thunderbolt 5 cable and an external power supply. OWC’s two existing Thunderbolt 5 docks remain available from $329.99.

On the market outlook, Larry’s closing assessment was that pricing is close to stabilizing, with the caveat that a week can change the picture, and that it will be a good while before prices move the other way. A sharp reversal, he added, would probably mean something else had gone badly wrong in the world. For more information, please visit the OWC website.

Are you still splitting storage and displays across two docks, and has the memory squeeze pushed you back to spinning drives? Let us know in the comments below!