The Promise Pegasus J2 is a portable solid-state drive that has a dual personality. Away from the studio, the drive is a portable, bus-powered SSD with good performance for video and photo editing in the field. While in the studio (and connected to AC power), the drive kicks the spurs and sprints along as one of the faster drives we've tested. Its dual nature means that you give up some speed when you're out and about, and it gives up some capacity compared to desktop-bound drives. It's a good solution for travelling visual artists who exclusively use Thunderbolt-equipped Macs, but there are better choices for everyone else.
Design and Features
The Pegasus J2 looks like a compact portable hard drive, though there are a few differences. The top of the drive has a bi-level look to it, with the end closer to the I/O ports a little bit thicker than the rest of the drive case. The two-toned drive case accentuates this look, with a silver top and black bottom. On the thicker end of the drive, there's a single Thunderbolt port, rather than the two daisy-chainable ports common on desktop-class drives. Flanking the Thunderbolt port are the drive's LED status indicator and a rubber door covering the drive's AC adapter jack. When the drive is simply plugged into a Thunderbolt port, the drive will work and the LED lights up green. When you add additional power from the included AC adapter, the LED glows blue, showing that the drive is in higher powered, higher throughput mode. More on that below, in the performance section of the review.
The drive is actually a pair of 128GB SSDs connected together in a RAID 0 array, giving the user 256GB of speedy storage. The drive arrives formatted HFS+ for Mac use, but you can reformat the drive exFAT or NTFS for use on Windows PCs. The drive comes with a Windows driver disk, but it doesn't include a Thunderbolt cable. The drive also lacks USB 3.0, something the Editors' Choice winning LaCie Rugged USB 3.0 Thunderbolt (120GB SSD) ($200) comes with. This makes the LaCie drive a better choice for people who encounter other PC and Mac users. All systems have USB drives, but only certain PCs and newer Macs have Thunderbolt ports. This will be a problem if you ever need to use the drive to transfer large files from your Mac to a system without a Thunderbolt port. You can use the Pegasus J2 as a speedy Time Machine backup drive on most MacBooks with flash storage, but we surmise that the drive will better be utilized as an external work drive for media work like editing short HD videos or working on digital photos. The drive comes with a standard two-year warranty, shorter than the three-year warranty you usually find on high performance drives.
Performance
The Pegasus J2 is one of the fastest drives we've reviewed, with the caveat that this speed was measured with the drive plugged into a wall outlet like a desktop-style drive. Plugged in, the Pegasus J2 copied our test folder in 3 seconds, and achieved a blistering 723MB/sec read and 665MB/sec write speed on our AJA System test. However, when working on bus power only, the drive managed a slower 16 seconds on the drag and drop test, an proportionally slower throughput on the AJA System test (295MBps read, 281MBps write). That is slower, though still competitive with the LaCie Rugged drive (17 seconds on Drag and Drop, 379MBps read, 200 MBps write). It's certainly faster than the Buffalo MiniStation Thunderbolt Portable HDD (HD-PA1.0TU3) ($230) (13 seconds on our Drag and Drop test, 110MBps read, 96MBps write), which has a 1TB spinning hard drive in it instead of a SSD. The thing is, if you need a semi-portable SSD RAID drive for work, other drives like the LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt (1TB SSD) ($999) (6 seconds on Drag and Drop, 620MBps read, 380MBps write) gives you similar performance with four times the storage space, and hence up to four times larger projects.
At the 256GB capacity, the Promise Pegasus J2 is a speedy, somewhat adaptable SSD array for the travelling photographer or videographer. However, the lower purchase price, and speedier performance (on bus power) of the LaCie Rugged USB 3.0 Thunderbolt lets it hold on to its Editors' Choice for rugged portable drives, and is a better choice for the oft travelling visual artist. If you need a drive for the studio, then other more capacious SSD drives like the LaCie Little Big Disk are more useful. The Pegasus J2 sits somewhere in the middle: You'll get some adaptability, but it's not a perfect solution for either case.
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