By Dave Bailey 23 Nov 2011
Verdict:
If you are a Mac user with a system that has a Thunderbolt connection, this is a good system. But if you don’t have a Thunderbolt connection, this storage is no good to you. A gigabit Ethernet connection would broaden the appeal of this storage to companies, as they could have attached it to existing networks. The Pegasus R6 will give both read/write speeds well above 600MB/s when configured as RAID 5 and well above 700MB/s when configured as RAID 0.
Pros:
Fast data reads and writes; simple to set-up.
Cons:
Pricey; no Ethernet connection.
Promise Technology’s Pegasus R6 direct attached storage (DAS) system uses 10Gbit/s Thunderbolt connectivity, so it will be of interest to Mac users thirsty for more personal storage, or to firms deploying Mac desktops who need fast storage for those Macs.
Priced at $1,499 (£970), you pay a premium for having Thunderbolt connectivity. The standard 6TB Promise SmartStor NS6700, which has dual gigabit EThernet ports, is around £250 less.
To use the Pegasus R6 system, users will need Mac hardware with a Thunderbolt connection, since the Pegasus R6 has no other connectivity, apart from a management serial port [see picture].
The Pegasus R6 we reviewed used Hitachi serial ATA (SATA) 3GB/s Deskstar 7K1000 HDS72101 1TB 7,200 hard disks, which can be set up to a variety of redundant array of independent disk (RAID) configurations [see picture].
In use
First, we installed the Promise Pegasus R6 management utility on our review MacBook Air. We fired up the utility to check what configuration the disks currently had [see picture].
The R6 is initially configured as a RAID5 system, giving 5TB of storage, but users can change this to other RAID configurations [see picture].
RAID is a storage technology that allows a collection of hard disks to be aggregated, so they can function as a single so-called logical hard drive.
Users can specify how they wish their hard disks to function. For example, users can specify a RAID level that optimises the hard disks for performance at the expense of data redundancy: RAID 0. Users can also define a RAID level that optimises data redundancy at the expense of performance: RAID 10.
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