Pegasus Thunderbolt RAID5 from PROMISE

TecnoTur by Allan Tepper

The high-performance video RAID5 you need for today’s modern Mac-based video editing systems

As many ProVideo Coalition readers may recall, I have written about disk arrays from PROMISE before, although the last time it was primarily to be used with a computer with an eSATA port. Now that all Mac computers (except for the MacPro tower) use a Thunderbolt port, many are looking for a disk array which will have the appropriate connection and that will be at least as fast as what they got previously with eSATA. In this article, you’ll find my results with the Pegasus from PROMISE, used both with a MacBook Mini and a MacBook Air. You’ll also find PROMISE’s official position on journaling or non-journaling with this device, since this was not previously documented anywhere to my knowledge.

The Pegasus configurations

At publication time of this article, the Pegasus RAID5 configurations are as follows, including current prices. The number after the letter “R” refers to how many drives are inside.

• Promise Pegasus R4 4TB (4x1TB) RAID (US$1149)
• Promise Pegasus R6 12TB (6x2TB) R6 RAID (US$2499)
• Promise Pegasus R4 8TB (4x2TB) RAID (US$1799)
• Promise Pegasus R6 6TB (6x1TB) RAID (US$1799)

All pricing exclude the price of a Thunderbolt cable, which are currently US$49. All of the Pegasus RAIDs include loopability, so you can add a monitor or Thunderbolt i/o device at the end. You can also daisy-chain up to six Pegasus RAIDs via Thunderbolt. Pegasus units are shipped standard as RAID5 (although can be re-configured to other RAID configurations, including 0, 1, 6, or 10) with HFS+ formatting and journaling active, which surprised me and was the only question I had to ask PROMISE to complete this article. read more...