Promise Pegasus2 Thunderbolt2 RAID Product Review - with Larry Jordan
Excerpt:
Recently, the folks at Promise Technology sent me an
8-bay
Pegasus2 Thunderbolt RAID to evaluate.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The
Promise Pegasus2 Thunderbolt RAID is
fast, easy to setup, fast,
easy to use, fast, provides a ton of storage space,
fast, and runs like any other Macintosh hard disk.
Oh, and did I mention that it is fast? It is.
It provides massive storage, excellent speeds, all at a
reasonable price. It isn’t as fast as an all-SSD unit, but it costs far less and
holds far more.
WHAT I WAS SENT
Promise sent me their latest Pegasus2 8-bay RAID, containing
eight 3 TB drives configured as a RAID 5. It formatted to 21 TB of usable space.
All the drives were installed prior to shipping. It has a retail price of around
$3,500, including all drives.
In the box are seven Quick Start Guides in fourteen languages.
New users should quickly skim this because of an important note on
synchronization. Connecting the drive is trivial: Plug in two cables – power and
Thunderbolt – turn on your computer and the Pegasus, and get to work.
This unit comes configured as a RAID 5. You can also configure
it using Disk Utility as a RAID 0. This will be faster than RAID 5, and store
more, but in the event one drive dies, you lose all your data. I happily use
smaller RAID 0′s in my editing. But for something this big, I want the security
of knowing my data is safe in the event of a drive crash.
WHAT MAKES THIS SPECIAL
The Pegasus2 is the first RAID that supports Thunderbolt 2,
the new communications protocol that was released with the new Mac Pro. This new
protocol supports data transfer rates up to 2.2 GB/second.
Thunderbolt 2 is fully compatible with Thunderbolt 1 devices.
As you’ll see below, the Pegasus works perfectly – though not at the same speeds
– with both iMacs and Mac Pros, and operating systems 10.8.5 and 10.9.1. In
other words, you can use this unit on any Mac with a Thunderbolt connection.
Click here for the FULL Product Review of the
Promise Pegasus2 RAID with Thunderbolt2 Connectivity.