Apple Thunderbolt Cable & Promise Pegasus RAID System Available Now

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• L. - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link

  No.
  
  Come back to reality my friend, 10 GbE is not standard yet, and while that lasts, this thunderbolt thingy puts it in a different category (of DAS, and faster access).
  
  I've got my own raid10 4TB NAS, it's much more useful to me than this thing, but over 1GbE you can't quite go past 100 MB/Sec ;)

• mcnabney - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link

  But Thunderbolt only provides data to a single computer. Which makes it about as useful (or useless) as any other external drive. It might be fast, but really - who needs this kind of speed and has a single Macbook or iMac? I have over 10TB on my server and it gets accessed by a half dozen machines on a daily basis.
  
  Maybe it is a NAS issue for you, but I can read/write at over 100Mbs with my WHS box.

• MGSsancho - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link

  I believe this would be called a DAS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-attached_stora...
  
  This is not the cheapest nor the more expensive solution. This is also not the fastest or the slowest product you can buy. For laptops this will probably be the fastest product you can buy at the moment. It might be faster than USB3 but remember these technologies are not similar. Thunderbolt as direct memory access like firewire. For many people this isn't a problem and it is a plus. Personally i wont trust thunderbolt keychains and dongles unless i can turn off the device manually via the OS. But again for the market this box is in, it just might be the best thing currently available.

• dagamer34 - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link

  There's a reason they don't sell the box without the drives....

• IdBuRnS - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link

  "The packaging isn't quite as nice as what we're used to from Apple, but the device inside is really what matters."
  
  The packaging of what? The cable? It's a cable, does it really need more complex and wasteful packaging? The Promise device? It's not from Apple, why would Apple have any say in the design of the packaging?
  
  Seriously?

• mariush - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link

  6 x 75$ drives
  1 x 40$ cable
  1 x 200$ hardware and construction
  
  about 900$ apple tax and profits.
  
  A 10gbps network card is now 500$ and could get down to around 300$ if there would be interest from public - could easily get two 10gbps network cards and build your own Promise Pegasus R6 12TB for less than 1500$.

• name99 - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link

  Jesus dude, WHAT FSCKING "Apple Tax"?
  You do understand that this is NOT an Apple product, right? That's why the box has Promise written on it in big letters, not Apple written in big letters.
  
  Do you run around complaining about "the Windows tax" because myrinet devices or infiniband devices are more expensive than ethernet?

• mariush - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link

  Apple had an agreement with Apple to release Thunderbolt on Apple and Apple has the exclusivity for it for a period.
  
  The reasoning Intel probably had is that if Apple can get people hooked to Thunderbold as the only way to transfer data from laptops to ipads to iphones along with the iTunes drm and high prices, it will then be easier to port it to PC and get high license fees and something unique to Intel systems.
  
  Thunderbold is basically "Light Peak" from intel, renamed.. see the Wikipedia article if you don't believe me. It was supposed to be a fiber optics only but Intel couldn't manage to reduce the power requirements and volume of the parts and the costs in time so they fell back to using copper - as it is right now it's basically a 20 gbps copper connection.
  Yet, this device can only do about 650 MB/s or about 6 gbps , something that can be almost done nowadays on USB 3 and can easily be done with 10gbps network cards and a regular 3$ cat 6 net cable.

• mariush - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link

  Sorry.. Intel had an agreement with Apple.

• Penti - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link

  Thunderbolt is Intel's own god damn brand for flying spaghetti monsters sake! It's a good fit in the prosumer and professional market that Apple also has, your post is so irrelevant it's ludicrous no consumer devices like cell phones will get Thunderbolt as it uses PCI-Express. Which means a device like this is internally x2 PCI-Express version 2.0 or x4 PCI-Express 1.1 and thus limited to 8Gbit/s bidirectional over this 10Gbit/s bidirectional link aka Thunderbolt. Intel's chipset will get USB 3 with Ivy Bridge, thus also Apple later on. Thats what future mobile phones will use not this. But Thunderbolt will still be a addon chip attached to PCI-Express lanes. It's the device that is limited to the ~650MB/s. It's only four or six consumer drives in raid 5. For a cheap controller in solutions like this one it's pretty good.
  
  And a NAS with 10GbE won't magically do 650MB/s easily or cheaply for that matter. Network protocols like SMB won't pull that. Neither is it aimed at those, Promise sells SANs and FC-adapters for those that need multiuser storage. A Mac Pro with Raid 5 card directly won't exactly be cheaper then this either. Your post is only ridiculous and clueless.
  
  It's not for backing up to your overpriced Time Capsule at home. And you will be able to use cheap USB 3 drives next year without adapters when Ivy Bridge Macs are out. This is not to compete with USB 3. It's also definitively more robust, faster and everything will work like it would natively with an internal raid-setup pretty much. It's also used by professional tools where USB 3 wouldn't be a good fit.