The most productive part of a shoot day is the shoot. What slows a production down is everything that happens after you pack up: cards stacked on a desk, a laptop with two ports, a reader balanced on a drive balanced on a notebook. ProGrade Digital has spent eight years building the field side of that handoff with cards and readers professionals trust. The PG25 Pro Thunderbolt 5 Dock and the PG20 Pro Thunderbolt 4 Hub are the company’s answer for the other side of it.
Thunderbolt 5 at the center of workflow
The PG25 Pro Dock is the flagship. Its upstream Thunderbolt 5 port delivers up to 140 W, enough to keep a laptop charging at full speed while you ingest a day of footage. Three downstream Thunderbolt 5 ports push 15 W each. Transfer speeds reach 80 Gb/s, or 10 GB/s, which turns an 8K offload from a coffee break into something closer to a stretch and a glance at your email.
Legacy gear still works. Two USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 ports sit alongside two USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 ports, so the shuttle drive you’ve been handing clients since 2019 still has a home. A 3.5mm jack handles monitoring. The 2.5GbE Ethernet port is the piece editors will notice on delivery day, when a finished cut has to reach a NAS or a client server without crawling over Wi-Fi.
Magnetic design
Plenty of docks move data. The design choice that separates the PG25 is its magnetic top, sized to hold two ProGrade readers or two PG10.5 Pro Mini SSDs. Your CFexpress reader stops migrating to the far corner of the desk. It sits where you left it, powered, ready for the next card. And ProGrade has always thought of the little details. Their 2-pack of short cables are designed to connect those devices to the dock or hub and not leave you with 3 feet of spare cable on your desk.
A patented magnetic base anchors the dock itself, and an adhesive metal plate ships in the box. Mount the unit under a desk, on a cart or against the side of an edit station. Kensington Standard and Nano security slots round out a design clearly built with shared studio space in mind.
A Thunderbolt 4 option
Not every bay needs Thunderbolt 5, and ProGrade didn’t force the upgrade. The PG20 Pro Hub covers Thunderbolt 4 and USB 4.0 at 40Gb/s. Its upstream port handles 85 W charging. Three downstream ports deliver 15 W each, with a USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 connection for older peripherals. The magnetic top carries two readers, same as its bigger sibling.
Better still, the two daisy-chain. Run the PG25 at your primary station and add the PG20 when a project brings more drives than one unit can hold. Editors working across a laptop at home and a tower at the studio can keep an identical stack in both places.
The company behind it
ProGrade Digital launched in 2018 out of San Jose, founded by former Lexar and SanDisk executives who spent decades building memory cards for professional cameras. That history shows up in small decisions. Both units include a certified Thunderbolt cable, which removes the guesswork that sinks so many dock purchases. Both carry a two-year warranty. Neither pretends to be a consumer accessory.
Mobile workflows have gotten remarkably good. Cards are faster, readers are smaller, cameras write more data than a laptop can comfortably swallow. The bottleneck moved to the desk, where all of it has to land, get organized and go out the door. The PG25 and PG20 are built to clear it. If your ingest routine currently involves a drawer full of dongles, hardware from a company that thinks about cards first is worth a look.
You can learn more about the ProGrade Digital PG25 Pro Thunderbolt 5 Dock and the PG20 Pro Thunderbolt 4 Hub on progradedigital.com.
