Promise Intros Pegasus RAID Thunderbolt Storage Devices

It appears that this year's Computex trade show is not in the least bit short on storage devices, as proven by Promise, whose R4 and R6 RAID multi-drive storage devices were built with a certain, new connectivity standard.

The market may already be more than familiar with the Super Speed Universal Serial Bus (USB) 3.0 high-speed interface standard.

Still, there are other connectivity technologies running about, some of which capable of competing with it, if not complement or supplement it.

The Thunderbolt, for instance, is a fairly recent invention by Intel which, though not close to its true potential, can work at 10 Gbps.

Not many external drives or computers of any kind really use it, for now at least, but MacBook and iMac devices from Apple definitely do.

As such, Promise designed its Pegasus R4 and R6 RAID devices with Thunderbolt, ensuring compatibility with these systems.

"By employing Thunderbolt, with which the MacBook Pro and iMac are compatible, we wanted to provide high-speed, easy-to-use storage devices," said Steven Lien, deputy manager, Corporate Marketing Department, Sales & Marketing Division of Promise Technology.

For those that want specifics, the R4 can house four SATA hard disk drives, while the aptly named R6 can cope with two more (thus, a total of 6).

Both Pegasus series members have two Thunderbolt ports each and can transmit DisplayPort video signals to compatible systems.

Still, a more relevant asset is the fact that up to six RAID units can be daisy-chained together, so that one can access the complete, large amount of storage space easily and quickly.

"The read/write throughput of the Pegasus connected via Thunderbolt is higher than that of a Serial ATA-connected HDD embedded in an iMac," Promise Technology said.

Unfortunately, as is no longer any sort of surprise for things brought to Computex, or any other trade shows for that matter, pricing and availability details have not been disclosed.