The waiting for Thunderbolt - ready peripherals is over . Four months after thedebutof Thunderbolt in Apple ’s revampedMacBook Prolineup , memory devices that support Intel ’s young interconnect engineering science have finally come . And while these initial products impart a renowned price tatter , Macworld Lab ’s first tests show Thunderbolt offering a great jump forward in terms of performance .
On Tuesday , Promise Technologies annunciate the availability of thePegasus R4 and R6 . These outside RAID systems , with either four ( Pegasus R4 ) or six ( Pegasus R6 ) drive bays , have two Thunderbolt ports and stove in price from $ 999 for an R4 with four 1 TB 7200 - rpm heavy drives , to $ 2000 for an R6 with six 2 TB 7200 - rpm hard drives . The necessary Thunderbolt cable length is not include with either unit , but isavailable from Applefor $ 50 .
With the proper adapters , Thunderbolt has the power to confirm many type of peripheral connections ( including HDMI , USB , FireWire , Fibre Channel and more ) . In accession to storehouse devices , you may connect Mini DisplayPort displays , such as Apple ’s LED Cinema Display ( ) .
Test results are in MBps (higher is better), except for Photoshop CS5, which is in seconds (lower is better). Best results inbold.
Our initial psychometric test with the Thunderbolt - equipped 12 TB R6 determine that it is considerably fast than similar devices we ’ve try — devices that practice FireWire , USB , or both . The R6 is thunderclap - only , so we could n’t keep apart the performance differences of the connection by testing the R6 with a different interface . As a point of citation , we compared the R6 to another Promise RAID raiment , the $ 799 SmartStor DS4600 ( ) with four 1 TB drive ( unfortuantely , we do n’t have access to an regalia that ’s similar to the R6 ) . The R6 and DS4600 were screen as RAID 5 devices .
We used two dissimilar systems to test the maraud : a 15 - inch 2.2GHz Core i5 MacBook Pro with a 256 GB unanimous - country drive and 4 GB of RAM ; and a 27 - in 2.7GHz Core i5 iMac with a 1 TB hard drive and 4 GB of RAM .
Benchmarks: Promise Pegasus R6 with Thunderbolt Tested with iMac
exam results are in MBps ( higher is better ) , except for Photoshop CS5 , which is in seconds ( lower is better ) . just results inbold .
When connect to the iMac , the R6 ’s AJA System Test read scores came in at 566MBps—6.8 metre faster than the DS4600 using FireWire 800 . Even more telling was the R6 ’s 644MBps AJA System Test write score , which is 11.5 times faster than the FireWire 800 account of the DS4600 .
Copying a 2 GB file from the iMac ’s internal severe drive to the RAID was 30 percent quicker on the R6 . Copying the 2 GB file from the RAID back to the iMac ’s interior drive was a little more than twice as tight as the R6 than on the DS4600 that used FireWire 800 . Folder copy results were very similar to file copy trial run resultant . A low - store Photoshop trial using big files and the RAID as a scratch disk showed the R6 to be 37 pct faster than the DS4600 .
Benchmarks: Promise Pegasus R6 with Thunderbolt Tested with MacBook Pro
When connected to the MacBook Pro ( which has a slow processor than the iMac , but a faster internal SSD ) , we see that the R6 ’s AJA System Test result are very standardized to the termination when the R6 is attached to an iMac . In our tests involve the 2 GB file and 2 GB folder of file cabinet , the R6 benefited from the self-colored - res publica drive in the MacBook Pro . Across the plug-in in these mental testing , the R6 - MacBook Pro / SSD combination outperformed the R6 attached to an iMac with an national knockout drive .
USB 2.0 and FireWire 400 are include for comparison ’s sake . palpate destitute to snicker at the more - than-20 - times faster AJA System Test compose speeds that the R6 posts over the DS4600 connect via USB .
Check back soon for more effect , including eSATA , RAID 0 , and reports on using Thunderbolt for both Target Disk and Target Display modes . Like Apple and Thunderbolt , we ’re just getting started .
[ James Galbraith is Macworld research lab theater director . ]
