The Bottom Line
In our last review of the Pegasus 2, I came away happy with that storage solution and today Promise is back with a turn-key solution, the Apollo Cloud.
It certainly isn't hard to chew up tons of storage capacity with today's smartphones shooting high-resolution photos and 4K video. To combat this, many NAS vendors have been offering solutions to this by adding Dropbox, OneDrive and Google Drive to their app packages.
Promise has taken a different route making their entire platform focused on the cloud offering storage for all your devices. The Promise Apollo Cloud is a single bay 2TB solution backed by a single gigabit Ethernet connection. Through the app available on nearly every platform, you have access to all your stored media anywhere in the world.
With that said, the Promise Apollo Cloud is compatible with Windows, MacOS, iOS, and Android platforms. The MSRP of the Promise Apollo cloud in the 2TB capacity comes in at $199.99 with a two-year warranty.
The Hardware
Packaging is very clean with capacity listed at the top right. An image of the device sits below with connectivity options at the bottom left.
The spine of the box has a simple specifications list. It includes the warranty at two-years and OS compatibility.
The scope of delivery included the power adapter, Ethernet cable, and a guide to help with setup.
Our first look at the Apollo Cloud shows a very sleek device with subtle branding on the front.
On the back of the device, we have a small reset button, power input and the gigabit Ethernet port coupled with USB 3.0.
Opening up the Apollo Cloud, I was surprised to see a Toshiba 2TB drive.
At the heart of the Apollo Cloud, I found the Marvell 88F6-BRT4 surrounded by RAM and flash from SKHynix.
The Software
Starting off our install, I went with the Windows utility, which starts by you needing an Apollo account for the cloud service.
During the software install, you have a few options for automatic startup.
Once inside the software, you will find a sidebar with categories. As you upload media, they will be categorized by file extension and put into these itemized lists.
In the settings menu, you get a decent amount of control over the Apollo. From here you can setup transfers via USB along with Apollo Mirror if you have two units.
Switching gears, we now go over to the iOS app.
So, once you have the app installed and you log in via the account created in the beginning, you will have a similar interface as the Windows install.
To sync or upload media from your phone, you simply click the "add content" link at the top of the app, which brings up the menu seen here.
As you can see, there are options such as TouchID built in for convenience, and you can shut down cell data, so you don't get into trouble while on the go.
Further down in the app, we have the status of the Apollo Cloud along with transfer and mirror options.
The Performance
Starting with a quick run through file sizes, the Apollo Cloud performed quite well. Read starts our at 110 MB/s and soars down while write performance started at 66 MB/s held steady through 256K and then came down.
Above, we have three real-world transfers for the Apollo Cloud. With the 200M file, this solution produced 97 MB/s read and 81 MB/s write. Moving to 800M, we grabbed 87 MB/s read and 74 MB/s write, and lastly 4000M hit 87 MB/s read and 72 MB/s write.
This last test I connected our Intel 730 SSD via USB 3.0 with 6GB of data onboard. Judging by timestamps alone, it took the Apollo Cloud 1:40 to copy that data giving us a 50-60 MB/s copy rate.
The Verdict
I enjoyed much of my time with the Apollo Cloud; it's one of those devices you kind of forget is there because of its small form factor and me being used to multiple bay appliances. It is virtually silent in operation, so that too goes far. Build quality is quite good, and Toshiba does have a rather solid reputation for their hard drives and adding to that this unit was easy to open up so replacing the drive should not be hard at all if you were to have issues.
The performance of this system was on par with expectations. I think it is held back slightly due to the hardware inside, but it did offer 97 MB/s read and 81 MB/s write, which should be plenty for most.
Each of the apps used for testing were very easy to setup; I'd say the iOS application is slightly better as far as navigation goes but uploading data is much quicker with the desktop version. Overall, as a turn-key solution, the Apollo Cloud is a solid device and offering two capacity options opens the market slightly for consumers wanting such a device.
Tyler's Test System Specifications
- Motherboard: ASUS Maximus IX Hero (buy from Amazon)
- CPU: Intel Core i7 7700K (buy from Amazon) / (Read our Review)
- Memory: G.SKILL TridentZ DDR4 3200 (buy from Amazon)
- Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Hybrid (buy from Amazon)
- OS Storage: Intel 730 480GB SSD (buy from Amazon) / (Read our Review)
- Secondary Storage: MyDigitalSSD BP5 512GB SSD (buy from Amazon)
- Case: EVGA DG-86 (buy from Amazon)
- Power Supply: EVGA SuperNOVA 750 P2 (buy from Amazon)
- Networking: ASUS PCE-AC88 AC3100 (buy from Amazon)
- Networking: ASUS ROG 10G Express
- Networking: ASUS Thunderbolt EX3 (buy from Amazon)
- OS: Microsoft Windows 10 (buy from Amazon)
Performance | 85% |
Quality | 85% |
Features | 90% |
Value | 95% |
Overall | 89% |
The Bottom Line: Promise's Apollo Cloud is a solid device, and as a turn key NAS storage solution for all your devices, a great option for consumers at a good price.
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