PC Advisor by Andrew Harrison
The Promise J2 is not just the smallest Thunderbolt drive we've seen. It's also arguably the fastest, with a neat two-speed facility that still lets it work without mains power.
Promise Technology is a Taiwan-based company specialising in professional storage products. We rarely see its products at the consumer level, although in 2011 Promise drew the limelight as the first company to launch a Thunderbolt product, outside of its creators Intel and Apple.
The Promise Pegasus R6 was a mighty six-bay desktop RAID box exploiting the new high-speed interface. Fast, very; and highly capacious with 12TB of online storage.
Now at the other end of the scale – in size terms anyway – is the Pegasus J2.
The Pegasus J2 is Thunderbolt drive based on solid-state flash storage. It’s actually built around two mSATA modules, configured by default in a RAID 0 striped array for best performance. RAID is achieved in software in OS X. It’s available in either 256 GB or 512 GB capacities.
Only 110mm long, the Promise J2 is truly pocketable, even with its strangely stepped profile, about 18mm thick one end and 21mm the other. That’s to accomodate an internal fan which kicks in when the device is working at peak performance.
And what a peak that can be too. While the company’s own Pegasus R6 just beat it in simple sequential read speeds, the J2 has a major advantage in random read/write speeds, as you might expect from an SSD compared to spinning platter technology. read more...
Leave a comment