After many delays, computer peripheral manufacturer Belkin finally put its long-promised Thunderbolt docking station up for sale on its online store for $299. The peripheral was originally announced way back in 2011, and a near-final version was showed off at this year's CES, but this is the first time the peripheral has been offered for sale.

The dock offers a gigabit Ethernet jack, three USB 3.0 ports (each capped at 2.5Gbps, about half of the theoretical maximum), a FireWire 800 port, audio-in and audio-out jacks, and two Thunderbolt ports. One of those ports is used to connect the dock to your computer, and the other can be connected to a display or another Thunderbolt peripheral; up to five additional devices can be daisy-chained to it at a time.

When Apple debuted Intel's Thunderbolt connector in its 2011 Mac lineup, the interface seemed promising—here was a high-bandwidth connector that could potentially bring desktop-esque expandability to slim laptops and tablets. The reality has been a bit less rosy: low adoption in PCs, issues with licensing and cost, and ever-widening adoption of the usually-fast-enough USB 3.0 standard have put a crimp in Thunderbolt's style. Most products that use the interface have, to date, been either expensive professional storage products or Apple's own Thunderbolt display. Matrox also has a Thunderbolt dock with fewer ports available for $249, but promises of more exotic things like docks for high-powered graphics cards have largely failed to materialize.