Promise Pegasus32 R4 TB3-USB-C DAS Review

TweakTown's Rating: 90%

The Bottom Line

If performance is what you are after, the Pegasus32 R4 offers all of that and multi-platform flexibility of USB-C and Thunderbolt 3.

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With the fast rise in popularity of USB 3.2 and the USB-C connection, vendors are quickly revamping product lines to take advantage of the increased performance and flexibility offered. Promise isn't one to fall behind so today we look at their first, USB-C enabled platform; Pegasus32.

Pegasus32 carries over much of what Promise offered in the Pegasus3 lineup. To that point the naming scheme has stayed the same with R4, R6 and R8 units available along with a solid RAID platform that supports everything from high performance RAID0 to RAID5 and 6 for redundancy and RAID10 for a mix of performance and redundancy. Capacities offered depend on platform, for the model in house you are looking at 12TB and 16TB models while the R8 is capable of 112TB of raw capacity.

Connectivity is setup via two USB-C Ports that offer both Thunderbolt 3 at 40Gbps and USB 3.2 Gen2 at 10Gbps with charging capabilities at 85W. The DP 1.4 Port supports 8K monitors along with 4K60. OS compatibility includes both Windows 10 and macOS 10.14, Pricing for these units is currently unavailable but warranty is listed at three-years.

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Packaging for the 32 offers capacity along the bottom right next to connectivity and an image of the device.

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The box does offer a full specifications list along with box contents and diagram below.

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Included in the box; we have a Thunderbolt 3 cable, power cable and reading materials.

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Aesthetically, the Pegasus32 shares a near identical enclosure design to the Pegasus3. Along the left side we have the power button and activity LEDS. Each drive bay offers independent activity LEDS as well.

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On the back, we have a cooling fan centered with USB-C ports along the top and to the right the DP 1.4 port with full 8K monitor support.

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The Pegasus32 is a turn-key platform and is supplied with Toshiba HDDs.

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The Pegasus32 is configured and managed from the Promise Utility available on both Windows and macOS. From here we get an overview of the system to the left and event and storage overviews to the right.

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Moving over to the drives, we get an overview of their location in the enclosure along with the array they are part of.

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One more tab over and we can view RAID information including type, capacity and cache policy.

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With the Promise Utility you can schedule background activities including redundancy checks, rebuild and migration.

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For performance testing, I started with RAID 0 and CDM. Sequential performance reached 785 MB/s read and 864 MB/s write.

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Moving over to AJA, we see 345 FPS for write and 319 FPS for read operations at 1080p.

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Last, we look at Flash Bench which offers around 750 MB/s read and 875 MB/s write at its peak.

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Switching to RAID 5, read performance comes in at 567 MB/s with write at 643 MB/s.

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FPS for RAID5 come in at 192 FPS read and 252 FPS write.

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Flash Bench shows solid performance at 16M with write nearing 850 MB/s and read just shy of 720 MB/s.

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For maxed out performance, I removed the Toshiba HDDs and installed 3x SATA SSDs and re-ran testing in RAID 0. That said, we got only a minor performance bump in sequentials, likely held back by the USB-C interface but gained 4x in random workloads.

The Pegasus32 is the next evolution of desktop storage; combining both USB and Thunderbolt into a single interface offering the next level in platform flexibility. Build quality is still top notch including fit and finish all the way down to the drive bay mechanisms.

Performance of this unit was fantastic and while I did only test with 10Gbps USB-C, no performance was lost or gained wit this being a turn-key HDD based unit. In my testing RAID 0 was able to produce 780 MB/s read and 860 MB/s write and up to 340 FPS in AJA 1080p testing. For RAID 5, we found slightly lower numbers at 560 MB/s read and 640 MB/s write and a peak of 250 FPS in AJA.

Adding to the overall package was the Promise Utility software. This gave us a fantastic overview of the system and drives allowing easy management of the platform all the way down to redundancy and migration activities.

Pricing of the Pegasus32 is currently unknown but I do expect it to mirror the Pegasus3 lineup at $1499 for the 12TB R4 and $1799 for the 16TB model.

Tyler's Test System Specifications

• Motherboard: ASUS Crosshair VIII Formula X570 (buy from Amazon)
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 (buy from Amazon)
• RAM: Corsair Vengeance 16GB 2x8GB DDR4 3600 (buy from Amazon)
• Cooler: Corsair Hydro H60 (buy from Amazon)
• Case: Corsair Carbide 275R (buy from Amazon)
• OS Storage: Corsair MP600 1TB (buy from Amazon)
• Power Supply: Corsair RM850x (buy from Amazon)
• OS: Microsoft Windows 10 (buy from Amazon)