Thunderbolt ready peripherals are finally available in the Apple Online Store. The company Promise Technologies have announced the Pegasus R4 and R6, which are external raid systems with Thunderbolt technology, which are now available to buy. Already these Thunderbolt raid systems have been tested and are proving to offer a huge step forward in terms of speed and performance. The R4 version of the Pegasus Raid will cost $1000 and with it you get four 1TB hard drives. For $2000 you will be able to purchase an R6 which will have six 2TB hard drives inside. You will also need to buy a Thunderbolt cable which is not included but is available on the Apple Store at $49.

Pegasus Thunderbolt Raid from Promise Technologies

The R6 version of the Pegasus Raid from Promise Technologies is only available for use with Thunderbolt ports so the testers were not able to properly compare how fast it was with FireWire or USB. On the other hand the R4 also has a FireWire port and has proved to be much faster with the data transfer when using Thunderbolt raid technology. The R6 Raid Drive compared to similar systems was about seven times faster. The speed of the processor of the computer that the Pegasus Raid Drive is connected to, does make a difference to how fast the transfer is, and the speed is also affected by how fast the hard drive is on the computer. If there is any sort of bottleneck that that will be the fastest speed possible. If you are using an internal SSD drive you will be able to achieve extremely high performance with your data transfer and over time hard drive speeds will get faster as more MacBookPros and iMacs start to use SSD drives.

The Promise Technologies company making the Pegasus raid storage drives are claiming transfer rates of over 800 MB per second. People like designers or professionals using audio or video and photographers too, will be able to bring in data and send out data very, very quickly. Being able to get the work done faster is always good. Time is money.

Thunderbolt for Graphic artists

Graphic artists that are using Photoshop which is a huge program and often can be slow, or 3-D graphic artists who might use a program called Maya 3-D Animation will be up to manipulate their data and use extremely high resolution graphics when connected to the Pegasus Raid drives and the work flow will seem much more responsive.

As you know, with Thunderbolt you will be able to connect from your MacBook Pro to the Raid drive and then on to the display. Or connect to a monitor, which then can be connected to the Pegasus Raid Drive with a video pass through. What you can also do is to connect up to 6 units of the Pegasus Raid drives to make a daisy chain. That will give you 36 hard disk drives and a huge amount of storage space.

This Thunderbolt Device is going to be popular especially as it is the first to the market of the Thunderbolt enabled storage devices.