Note that Thunderbolt 2 is the next generation of Thunderbolt, which offers a 20Gbps connection speed (twice that of Thunderbolt). Other than the black color and the support for Thunderbolt 2, the new Pegasus2 lineup is almost exactly the same as the previous generation. It's not perfect, though, since it's very expensive and, in my trial, would take a relatively long time to resume from sleep mode, making it a little inconvenient to use with a laptop.īut the Pegasus2 is definitely a desktop storage solution, and while for most consumers it's overkill, for professionals who need super-fast speed or archiving or real-time 4K video editing, its incredible performance is worth the hefty investment, which is between $1,500 and $4,600, depending on the model and capacities. It almost doubled the performance of its predecessor, as you'd expect from the move to Thunderbolt to Thunderbolt 2. In my testing, the Pegasus2 R8 proved to be the fastest consumer-grade direct-attached storage solution to date. Other than that it's very similar to the previous-generation models.Īs a hardware RAID system, the Pegasus2 supports all RAID configurations available for the number of internal drives it houses, be it four drives (the R4 model), six drives (the R6), or eight (the R8). LaCie 5Big Thunderbolt drive also configured as RAID 0, we found the striped Pegasus2 to be about 50 percent faster writing and 20 percent faster reading than the LaCie, overall.The Pegasus2 line is Promise's upgrade to the previous Pegasus lineup (including the Pegasus R6 and the Pegasus R4) it adds support for Thunderbolt 2 and an all new R8 model - used in this review - that includes eight internal drives to offer up to 32TB of storage space. Black Magic Disk Test and AJA System Test both showed the RAID 0 Pegasus2 topping 1100 MBps writing and anywhere from 800 to 963 Mps reading.

These striped tests showed the Pegasus2 to be between 22 and 30 percent faster at writing data than the same device in RAID 5 mode. We retested the Pegasus2 in RAID 0 mode, a faster configuration than RAID 5, but without RAID 5’s data redundancy-if one of the six drives fails in a RAID 0 array, all of your data is lost. Reference drives in italics.-Macworld Lab testing by James Galbraith and Albert Filice

Pegasus2 r6