The Promise Pegasus R4 is a four-bay RAID external drive for professionals that sling a lot of data. It is one of the latest Thunderbolt drives on the market for Mac and PC users who have adopted the speedy 10Gbps interface. It's a drive for the media, database, and scientific professional who needs to work on multi-TB projects, and who need to constantly submit their work now.
Features
The Pegasus R4 looks like a standard business-class RAID drive from the front. It's got an identical if shorter facade like its big brother, the Promise Pegasus R6 ($1,999). It's a big metal box with four removable drive sleds in the front, with power and access lights, and a perforated panel for cooling duties. In the back the drive has a pair of 10Gbps Thunderbolt ports, a Kensington lock port, cooling fan exhaust, and a standard 3-pin power port. The drive's internal power supply means that you won't have to find space for an external power brick, which saves a little space and makes it more convenient to move the drive to another Mac or PC.
The Pegasus R4 has four 1TB drives in it, giving you a 4TB RAID 0 configuration. You can setup the drive for RAID 1, 5, 6, and 50, which can give you data redundancy, at the expense of some drive capacity. For our tests and review, we left the drive in RAID 0 configuration. While more complex (if needed), the flexibility of RAID configurations are more flexible than the simpler RAID configs in the comparable Western Digital My Book VelociRaptor Duo ($900), LaCie 2big ($749), and Editors' Choice LaCie 5big Thunderbolt Series ($2,199).
The Pegasus R4 comes pre-formatted with HFS+ for OS X systems, but you can of course reformat the drive exFAT or NTFS for Windows PCs. The drive has no packed in software aside from drivers. This is fine, since the drive is positioned more as a data work drive than a backup drive. The drive only has Thunderbolt ports, so if you want to use the drive with a PC, you'll need a PC with a Thunderbolt port. Since the drive lacks USB or eSATA, you won't be able to copy data directly off your old PC or Mac. The drive comes with a shorter 2-year warranty, many drives in this price class come with three years of coverage.
Performance
The reason to buy a Thunderbolt-equipped external drive is for performance, and the Pegasus R4 has that base covered. The drive takes a short three seconds to copy our standard drag and drop test folder, and showed prodigious throughput rates (525 MBps read, 630 MBps write) at the AJA System test. This means the drive is well suited for high-throughput activities like HD video editing, large-scale database development, and almost instantaneous information search and retrieval. It's also a good fit for scientific duties, where users need to analyze and interpret large swaths of digital info. On our tests, it's much faster than the Western Digital My Book VelociRaptor Duo (11 seconds on the drag and drop test, 374 MBps read, 343 MBps write), as well as the Pegasus R6 (6 seconds on the drag and drop test, 480MBps read, 620MBps write). However, it is measurably slower than the prodigiously capacious LaCie 5big (2 seconds on the drag and drop test, 645MBps read, 677MBps write). That said, if you work on smaller project sizes of 1TB to 2TB at a time, the Pegasus R4 makes more sense than the huge 5big.
If you don't need 20TB of storage all the time, then the 4TB Promise Pegasus R4 is a very good media/database/scientific work drive. It will be a good companion to the upcoming Apple Mac Pro, or virtually any Thunderbolt-equipped Mac or PC. It's not quite as capacious or as fast as the LaCie 5big, our current Editors' Choice for desktop-class external drives, but nonetheless it would be a drive we'd recommend if you don't need quite that much storage.
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