Apple Thunderbolt Cable & Promise Pegasus RAID System Available Now
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 28, 2011 10:16 AM EST- Posted in
- Mac
- Apple
- Thunderbolt
- Promise
- Pegasus
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.
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
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!
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
47 Comments
View All Comments
Penti - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
No they are just resellers and are adding money on Apples books. Pretty much. However they do use and support Promise for their Xsan/Quantum StoreNext product and are partnering that way. Instead of for example just selling Quantum's own storage products which is also compatible. And as a replacement for their shut down Xserve RAID-line for that matter. They would gladly sell any other Thunderbolt solution when available.nafhan - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
Looking forward to seeing some comparisons vs. eSATA...Silenus - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
Indeed. It should entertaining how much it blows eSATA and USB 3 out of the water!L. - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
I believe that comparison is quite irrelevant, eSATA and USB3.0 are both cheap consumer interfaces.If you're looking at a 2000 bucks NAS (lol seriously) and this kind of performance, why not compare with something that could cost 2000 bucks when packaged (like for example a 1000 bucks box like I'd build it).
Oh well you can't quite do that, because 10GbE is not yet standard on motherboards.. but on the other hand, who the f* needs a NAS that doesn't sit on the network...
This product is definitely very niche, and practically will be completely useless +- 1 year from now when every motherboard has 10GbE included for free.
Could anyone familiar with cheap server hardware make a rough estimate of the cost of a cheap 10GbE mobo w/ switch ? (iirc that should be somewhere below 1k --)
Penti - Thursday, June 30, 2011 - link
A 10GbE mobo would cost like $1100 dollars, and a cheap 10GbE network card would cost like $500 dollars. Add in a hardware RAID 5-card and it's another $300 dollars at least.So at minimum it's a low-end board with x8 slot (you can use a free x16 slot for it too) for 10 GbE card, x4/x8 (or free x16 slot) for hw RAID 5 card, 10 GbE switch and a 10 GbE card in your client which for a compatible card in a Mac Pro is 1500 dollars. Adds up to about $170 motherboard, $210 cpu, $120 memory, $500 10 GbE network card, $300 HW RAID 5 card for four to eight disks, about $185 for case and power supply and another $480 for six 2TB hard drives. Which altogether is about $1965 USD plus 10GbE network card for the clients, and a 10GbE switch which is about $15 000 dollars. There is nothing cheap about going 10GbE. And they won't include it for free.
It will be below 20 000 dollars. Using cheap stuff.
casteve - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
Are the 6TB and 8TB offerings really priced the same?Looking at Newegg, I can buy the 1GB Deskstar for $60 and the 2GB for $120. Subtracting these etail prices from these things, the value of the rest of the system is:
R4/4TB = $759
R4/8TB = $1019
R6/8TB = $1139
R8/12TB = $1279
Yowsa.
piroroadkill - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
You've discovered the NAS price distortion field!Every fucking NAS is overpriced. You can always build a machine for less than a NAS. It makes absolutely no sense.
piroroadkill - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
Sorry, this isn't even a NAS, I apologise, but you get my point, and it still stands. Senseless.Strunf - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
Will your system look as nice as this one? use the same power? be as convivial and easy to operate? ... there's no distortion field is that everything comes at a price and some are ready to pay for it!Exodite - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
For 1500-2000 USD I'll build a mATX killer desktop as a NAS, including a nice SSD and those 12GB of HDD storage.I realize this is Apple land but with that markup I could probably have a case custom-built to my specifications of 'nice' for less money.