After that, since we had two R6 units available, we performed the second test in this category by copying data from one R6 to the other, so that one of the units was doing the reading while the other was doing the writing. In this test, the Pegasus R6 registered 192.53MBps and 228.06MBps in RAID 5 and RAID 0, respectively-about five times the speed of the fastest SATA 3 internal hard drives and about 170 percent the speed of a typical SSD.
This means the drive had to perform both reading and writing at the same time. First, we timed how fast the drive performed when copying data within itself, from one folder to another. Although Thunderbolt's ceiling throughput speed is a much higher 10Gbps (about 1.2GBps), the transfer rate will be limited to the notebook's internal drive speed.įor this reason, in the tests against internal drives, we let the Pegasus work with the least involvement of the MacBook Pro's hard drive as possible.
#Promise pegasus2 r6 review pro
Our test computer used with the Pegasus R6 was a brand-new 2011 MacBook Pro running OS X Lion, with a SATA 3 (6Gbps) SSD. In the second set, we stacked the Pegasus R6 up against other popular external devices that use USB 3.0, USB 2.0, FireWire, and eSATA connections. In the first set, we compared its performance with that of internal drives, both traditional hard drives and solid-state drives (SSDs). The device will still work normally during this time, however, just at a slower speed.Īs the R6 is the first Thunderbolt-based storage device, we benchmarked it with two sets of tests. Note that if one of the hard drives in the RAID dies, the Pegasus R6 would take up to 9 hours to rebuild the RAID configuration with a replacement drive. This is a great bonus as most other RAID-enabled storage devices would take tens of hours to build a RAID 5 array from scratch. In our trials, the drive switched between RAID 5 and RAID 0 in less than a minute. Pegasus R6 also supports RAID 0, 1, 50, 6, 60, and 10. RAID 5 is generally the recommended setup for a multiple-bay storage device to offer a balance of capacity, performance, and data integrity. These drives by default were set up in a RAID 5 configuration to offer 10GB of storage space, leaving 2TB for data redundancy. Our review units each came with six 2TB SATA 3 (6Gbps) hard drives.
#Promise pegasus2 r6 review install
Once you remove a drive tray, you can install or replace a drive easily with a standard Phillips-head screwdriver. You can pull the drives out easily via small latches that are sturdy enough to prevent you from pulling a drive out accidentally. On the front of the R6, in addition to standard power button and status lights, you'll find the six drive bays. We connected two Pegasus R6 units together in our testing and they indeed suffered no drop-off in performance. With the other port, you can daisy-chain up to five other Thunderbolt devices, or a Mini DisplayPort monitor, without reducing the connection bandwidth, per the Thunderbolt standard. You can use one of these ports to connect the drive to the host computer using a Thunderbolt cable, which unfortunately is not included and costs another $49. On the back, the R6 has a standard power connection port similar to that of a desktop computer, a big ventilation fan for the hard drives, another smaller vent for the built-in power supply, and two Thunderbolt ports. Nonetheless, like all devices made to work with Macs, the device manages to remain visually appealing, with an all-aluminum chassis. The Pegasus is about the size you'd expect a storage device that hosts six 3.5-inch internal hard drives to be: it's very large.