Apple Thunderbolt Cable & Promise Pegasus RAID System Available Now

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by Anand Lal Shimpi on 6/28/2011 10:16:00 AM
Posted in Mac , Apple , Promise , Thunderbolt , Pegasus

Buy the Pegasus Books 1-933-64806-6 sea on

This morning Apple finally announced availability of its first Thunderbolt cable alongside Promise's Pegasus external RAID solution. We've previewed the Pegasus in the past but today we received a shipping model of the 6-bay 12TB.

The packaging isn't quite as nice as what we're used to from Apple, but the device inside is really what matters. The R6 comes with six removable drive bays capable of accepting both 2.5" and 3.5" drives.

Gallery: Promise Pegasus R6 Thunderbolt RAID Solution & Thunderbolt Cable

There are two LEDs per drive bay as well as power and Thunderbolt LEDs on the left side of the device:

The Pegasus is audible thanks to its six hard drives and two fans, but it's not what I'd consider loud.

Promise is announcing availability of four different configurations of the Pegasus available via Apple's online store:

Promise Pegasus Lineup
	# of Bays	Drive Configuration	Default Capacity	Price
Promise Pegasus R4 4TB	4	4 x 1TB RAID-5	2.7TB	$999
Promise Pegasus R4 8TB	4	4 x 2TB RAID-5	5.7TB	$1499
Promise Pegasus R6 6TB	6	6 x 1TB RAID-5	4.7TB	$1499
Promise Pegasus R6 12TB	6	6 x 2TB RAID-5	9.7TB	$1999

All of the available Pegasus systems ship with 7200RPM 3.5" hard drives, although Promise mentioned that we will may see SSD enabled configurations in the future. The 12TB R6 we received uses six Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 2TB drives (HDS723020BLA642) in a 9.7TB RAID-5 configuration. The 7K3000 spins its four platters at 7200RPM and buffers data with a 64MB on-board cache. The drive has a 6Gbps SATA interface although the Pegasus R4/R6 supports SAS drives as well. All of the Pegasus devices ship in RAID 5 however they do support RAID-0/1/5/50/6/10.

I had no problems creating data on the Pegasus array at up to 688MB/s

Gallery: Promise Pegasus Utility

The 2 meter Thunderbolt cable is also finally available at $49.99. The cable is compatible with all 2011 MacBook Pros as well as the 2011 iMac.

We'll be testing the Pegasus R6 over the coming days, stay tuned for our review!

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Expensive cable by dagamer34 on Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Hopefully Monoprice.com will come and save the day.

dagamer34

RE: Expensive cable by quiksilvr on Tuesday, June 28, 2011

They usually do.

quiksilvr

RE: Expensive cable by Zap on Tuesday, June 28, 2011

No kidding! Wonder if there are any licensing fees for the cable/connector/tech?

Zap

RE: Expensive cable by greenbelt on Wednesday, June 29, 2011

It should be avialable to all OEM vendors.

greenbelt

Price on the Cable by Ninhalem on Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Ouch. $50 for a 2 m cable. That price is steep. I'll wait till Monoprice gets some of these cables in stock.

Ninhalem

RE: Price on the Cable by seapeople on Wednesday, June 29, 2011

If you're buying a $1500 6-bay hard drive enclosure does spending $50 on a cable really matter so much that you would delay your purchase?

seapeople

Suprised by Pessimism on Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Suprised Apple partnered with Promise... they don't exactly have a stellar reputation for quality or performance. I still fondly recall the Athlon XP days where glitchy Promise raid controllers with terrible drivers were eating people's data for breakfast.

Pessimism

RE: Suprised by davegraham on Tuesday, June 28, 2011

even better...how about when Promise nuked Carbonite's data? ;)

davegraham

RE: Suprised by CharonPDX on Tuesday, June 28, 2011

It's amazing how things change in a decade, really...

Yes, I have my own industry prejudices, but I've had to overcome them. (IBM Deathstar, anyone?)

CharonPDX

RE: Suprised by name99 on Tuesday, June 28, 2011

How is this an Apple partnership?
Neither making Mac peripherals nor having your hardware sold in Apple stores require "partnerships", unless you plan to weaken the term so much that it is meaningless.