Review: Promise Technology Pegasus2 R8 RAID

Studio Daily by Helmut Kobler

Industry’s First Thunderbolt 2 RAID Posts Impressive Speeds at an Affordable Price

Promise’s Pegasus2 R8 is an eight-drive, Thunderbolt-native RAID that’s currently the fastest in the industry, thanks to its early adoption of the same Thunderbolt 2 ports that recently started shipping on Apple’s newest Macbook Pro laptops and the new Mac Pro workstation, and is due soon on a few PCs. At $3,599 for 24TBs, the Pegasus2 is also the most affordable eight-drive RAID I’ve seen yet.

You’ll start seeing other Thunderbolt 2 RAIDs soon, but for now, the Pegasus2 has the territory all to itself, which translates into impressive performance. For instance, I ran Blackmagic’s Disk Speed Test app on my R8 in a RAID 5 configuration (one-drive redundancy), and got reads of around 900 MB/s and writes of 850 MB/s. Tests with AJA’s System Test app were similar. Either way you test it, that’s fast enough to handle any kind of video format you throw at it (and often many, many streams of popular formats), including 4K variants.

Of course, the Pegasus2’s speedy read and write scores still aren’t nearly as fast as you might expect from Thunderbolt 2’s 20Gb/sec throughput, which translates to roughly 2500 MB/s. But no eight-drive RAID based on spinning hard drives will ever get close to that high-falutin’ speed. For starters, even working together in a RAID, the Pegasus2’s eight 7200 rpm hard drives can only read/write data so fast. Secondly, running the Pegasus2 in its default RAID 5 configuration keeps one of the 8 drives for redundancy, which gives you only 7 drives contributing to high speeds. And, of course, I can’t remember the last technology that ever met its theoretical maximum speed in the real world. Oh well. read more...

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	Promise Pegasus 2 R Series 6-bay, 12TB RAID with Thunderbolt2 $2,230.00			Promise Pegasus 2 R Series 8-bay, 24TB RAID with Thunderbolt2 $3,491.00			Promise Pegasus 2 R Series 8-bay, 32TB RAID with Thunderbolt2 $4,461.00