A docking station is a unit for incasing a portable computer that expands into the equivalent of a desktop computer. A small notebook or laptop can be attached to the unit by using a connector for external peripheral devices. The docking station is usually equipped with expansion slots, drive bays, ports, and AC power. The expansion slots are for an adapter card that provides additional functions, such as graphics, video, and sound. The drive bays are for storage devices, such as hard disks, flash drives, CD/DVD drives, or PC cards. Ports provide an interface that connects devices such as printers, mice, keyboards, or modems. Some docking stations also have a wide network port, a USB port, and a network interface card (NIC). Wide network ports are commonly used for Ethernet cable to connect to the Internet and USB ports are for connecting to scanners, printers, and digital cameras. NICs are used to attach a laptop or notebook to a local area network (LAN).
Docking stations are not standardized but have a specialized design for specific device models. This is because most devices that can be docked vary not only in their design but also in the size of their connectors and output signals. Because of the wide array of devices that can be docked, there are a variety of docking stations. Docking stations are roughly divided into four basic varieties: converter dock, breakout dock, hybrid dock and port replicators. A converter dock is similar to a hub that has various converters plugged in. It uses an internal USB hub with USB port converters for display adapters, modems, audio chip sets, and memory card readers. These docking stations use non-proprietary connections that are supplied by third-party vendors.A breakout dock is basically an electrical connector separated into component connectors. It has duplicate existing ports plus additional external ports. Some of the ports use electrical splitters and adaptors on a standard port. Many breakout dock vendors have adapters with access to one or two buses with consolidated signals, which allow an additional number of ports than what is physically present. These docking stations use propriterary connections. A hybrid dock is directly connected to the motherboard’s chipset using a proprietary connection. It converts into a desktop by communicating with internal devices. Most models include additional ports and drives. Some hybrid docks have expansion cards, RAM, VRAM, CPU cache, and coprocessors.A port replicator is similar to a bundle of extension cables that expand the number of ports the computer can use. Each device is attached to the port replicator, allowing several devices to be simultaneously connected. Some port replicators have electrical adapters that change from one pinout to another such as a Digital Visual Interface (DVI) connector or Micro-DVI. Other port replicators have extra ports such as PS/2 ports, USB ports, game ports, SCSI, and wide network ports.
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