Thunderbolt RAID Pegasus 2 R4 – first look & review

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by Tej BabraMarch 7^th, 2014

Last October, the company Promise Technology extended its external Pegasus Thunderbolt RAID storage line with the new “R4” that comes driveless and on top features the new and very fast Thunderbolt 2 connection. The new, black R4 is an enhancement to the existing silver Pegasus R4 line that had a Thunderbolt 1 connection. I took a closer look at what the new R4 has in store.

Over the past few months, I have been searching for a Thunderbolt RAID that would suit my needs. A few weeks ago, I wrote a posting about this on my personal blog.  The main reason for my search was to help me migrate from my old Mac Pro tower, to a newer Mac Pro. I have many projects that are archived, and some still active on my old tower. I needed a solution, and therefore my search began.

The Twitter community was very helpful and provided suggestions to me. The post production community is very interactive on twitter, and was a great deal of help.  Then a local editor and colleague read my posting, picked up the phone and recommended I take his Promise Pegasus 2 R4 Diskless on a loan.

The Promise Pegasus 2 R4 seemed like a great solution as it’s diskless. The RAID simply allows you to swap out the hard drives in my Mac Pro, and drop them into the Pegasus R4. This allows me to migrate all my projects and media with a simple swap. Then be fully readily available on the new Mac Pro. Plus, I would have the added benefit of having 2, Thunderbolt 2 ports for all that glorious speed. How could I say no to that?

Once we had swapped out the drives, I was anxious to test it out.  The first step was to connect the Pegasus R4 it to my Mac Book Pro to take advantage of it’s Thunderbolt 1 connection. Initially, I was impressed at the speed gains, and the simple ability to jump back into my projects. However, not every transition is smooth. FCP7 had trouble with connecting with media. Many FCP7 projects had the dreaded “media offline” greeting.  I did not have this issue with either FCPX, Adobe or Avid. This was great news, and I felt fully confident that this would be a route I would like to go.

Then my curiosity kicked in. What was the advantages working with a Thunderbolt 2 connection and the new Mac Pro? Upgrading to the new Mac Pro was not something I had considered yet. This was mainly due to lack of support from Avid, (Avid now supports the new Mac Pro) and it really didn’t seem to benefit Adobe as of yet. The only real difference was FCPX, which seems to run much faster.  However, my curiosity had to be satisfied.

Transferring the Pegasus R4 was thankfully easy as it was not that heavy. The RAID is only a 4 disk configuration, which makes it easy to move from 1 location to another. We moved the Pegasus R4 to my colleagues edit suite, as he had already upgraded to the latest Mac Pro. After the unit was plugged into the new Mac Pro, and immediately recognized the RAID, and we were able to dive right in.

Working with this new set up provided initial impressions of a very fast edit suite. This felt several times faster than my current edit suite.  It also seemed  even faster than my Mac Book Pro configuration. It was truly remarkable. (I will save further comments for an upcoming full review.)  After my first impressions settled in, the real testing began.  It was clear Final Cut Pro 7 projects would not open, as this Mac Pro did not have it installed. In addition, Apple no longer supports it, therefore, I had no expectations anyway. Elements that were previously created, in After Effects projects opened with ease. Final Cut Pro X projects also opened, but with one small issue with media locations. The preferences on this Mac Pro differed from mine, which caused some issues, but was quickly rectified.

Once all the migration issues were resolved, everything ran fine. Thunderbolt 2 was very impressive. Transferring files and editing was much easier, and faster on this configuration rather than my current edit suite.  Disk speed testing was not a priority, as we did not have enough time. Time is money, and my colleague did have to get back to work.  We all know #PostDontStop.

Final Thoughts

Working with the Promise Pegasus 2 R4 Diskless, and the new Mac Pro has been very pleasant. The speed gains as well as the ease of transferring projects seems like a great way to migrate. The ability to hot swap out hard drives and continue working is a welcomed benefit. The Pegasus R4 may be the Thunderbolt solution I was looking for in a RAID.