Promise Pegasus R6 review: Promise Pegasus R6

Apple and Intel announced the Thunderbolt variant of Intel's LightPeak interconnect technology this past February with emphasis on high throughput speed of particular benefit to storage devices. Promise Technology's Pegasus R6, the first Thunderbolt-enabled storage device on the market, for the most part delivers.

7.7

Promise Pegasus R6

The Good

The Thunderbolt-enabled <b>Promise Pegasus R6</b> offers superb throughput speed and a large amount of storage, and supports multiple RAID configurations. You can also daisy-chain the drive with up to five other Thunderbolt devices without decreasing the throughput.

The Bad

The Promise Pegasus R6 only works with Thunderbolt-equipped Macs for now, it's expensive and relatively noisy, and it doesn't include the necessary Thunderbolt cable or any other peripheral connections.

The Bottom Line

If you have a Thunderbolt-enabled computer, the Promise Pegasus R6's storage capacity, its features, and especially its performance are worth the hefty investment for those who demand fast external storage.

Effectively this is a Mac-only storage peripheral, as Apple's newer desktops and laptops are currently the only computers on the market with the necessary Thunderbolt port. The Pegasus R6 doesn't support other data standards like USB and FireWire out of the box, and given the prices of $1,500 for the 6TB version and $1,999 for the 12TB version, the R6 is a hefty investment. We expect that the price will come down as more Thunderbolt storage devices come to market, but if you need fast, high-capacity storage today, the Pegasus R6 is the fastest external RAID array currently available.