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. Thunderbolt 2 is fully compatible with Thunderbolt 1 devices. I’ll explain further in the next section. NOTE: That preceding paragraph is a completely true statement, but it leads to some wildly incorrect conclusions. This new protocol supports data transfer rates up to 2.2 GB/second. The Pegasus2 is the first RAID that supports Thunderbolt 2, the new communications protocol that was released with the new Mac Pro. But for something this big, I want the security of knowing my data is safe in the event of a drive crash. I happily use smaller RAID 0’s in my editing. This will be faster than RAID 5, and store more, but in the event one drive dies, you lose all your data. You can also configure it using Disk Utility as a RAID 0. However, this requires working with Terminal and the Unix command line interface. You can improve performance a bit more by turning on “Forced Read Ahead,” which is disabled by default. I ran these tests based upon the factory default settings. In the morning both you and it will be ready to work. The best advice is to plug the unit in and let it do its thing overnight.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Before doing any work requiring maximum performance, wait until syncing is complete. For a drive this size, syncing took 10 hours, 42 minutes and 33 seconds.
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What syncing does is build the parity data between all the drives so that if a drive dies, you don’t lose all your data. While the drive is useable immediately out of the box, you don’t get access to its full performance until syncing is complete. The Pegasus arrived formatted, but not synced. Connecting the drive is trivial: Plug in two cables – power and Thunderbolt – turn on your computer and the Pegasus, and get to work. New users should quickly skim this because of an important note on synchronization. In the box are seven Quick Start Guides in fourteen languages. NOTE: Here’s an article that describes what RAID 5 means.
It has a retail price of around $3,500, including all drives. All the drives were installed prior to shipping. Promise sent me their latest Pegasus2 8-bay RAID, containing eight 3 TB drives configured as a RAID 5. It isn’t as fast as an all-SSD unit, but it costs far less and holds far more. It provides massive storage, excellent speeds, all at a reasonable price. Oh, and did I mention that it is fast? It is. 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. You can hear her audio interview here.Īs I was researching and testing this unit, I realized that this article needs to be part technical review and part a discussion on our expectations on storage technology today. NOTE: This is due to my meeting Elaine Kwok, product marketing manager for Promise, at the recent Storage Visions 2014 conference. Recently, the folks at Promise Technology sent me an 8-bay Pegasus2 Thunderbolt RAID to evaluate. ( Please read my disclosure on product reviews here.