mac.iLounge

Now that you can finally get your hands on Apple’s Thunderbolt Cables and Thunderbolt-ready Macs, you might just want to try some of the high-speed accessories that work with them. Pros and semi-pros out there can start snacking on this: the new Pegasus R4 and R6 RAID Storage Systems ($999-$1,999) from Promise. Don’t forget to snag one of those $49 Apple cables at the same time—it’s not included.

There are a total of four different models available. The R4 is sold populated with either 1 or 2TB drives, for a total of 4 or 8TB of storage; it’s the same idea with the R6, giving you a total of 6 or 12TB. Setting up RAID reduces the amount of usable space, but even the base model still has almost 3TB available. Two Thunderbolt ports are on the back of each drive—one for connecting to your Mac, the other for daisy-chaining more drives or other peripherals. They’re ridiculously fast: 10-20 times faster than USB 2.0, with bi-directional channels so you can edit and back up at the same time. Notably, the R4 runs at 500+MB/sec bandwidth, while the R6 achieves over 800MB/sec.