Plugged into the laptop (and into power) at all times. I found if I was moving the laptop from location to location (home to work, etc), most of the docks performed well. But if I leave my laptop for a week, eg only removing it on the weekend, all of the TB3 docks get squirrelly and in need of reset. Seems they all have problems with sleep or hibernate type situations -- even though macs don't hibernate unless on 2% power.
Nowadays I use amphetamine and never let my laptop sleep or display sleep while on power, ever. I also now set my display to never enter energy saver mode. I don't have to gumption to go back and retest any TB3 docks with those settings though. I rather like the Anker TB4 I have now.
IIRC I found CalDigit to be the most reliable, but it too would eventually crash or otherwise become invisible to the Mac.
Thanks! I haven't tested that scenario, I plug/unplug every day at home and at the office. I do quite a lot of sleep/wake cycles, but didn't have any issues.
I sort of settled on StarTech because they were the only docks that were available here at the tail-end of the COVID lockdowns, etc. But looking at reviews of ThunderBolt Docks on Amazon et al., it seems I have made the right choice by accident, because so far both my wife and I haven't had any issues with the StarTech docks that we have.
If I only knew that some models have Realtek NICs, I'd have paid more attention to getting the model with Intel I210. I guess I was expecting that 300 Euro docks that can use PCIe all have decent NICs.
Nowadays I use amphetamine and never let my laptop sleep or display sleep while on power, ever. I also now set my display to never enter energy saver mode. I don't have to gumption to go back and retest any TB3 docks with those settings though. I rather like the Anker TB4 I have now.
IIRC I found CalDigit to be the most reliable, but it too would eventually crash or otherwise become invisible to the Mac.