Thunderbolt RAID dramatically faster than FireWire 800
A first lab test of the Promise Pegasus R6 — The wait for Thunderbolt-ready peripherals is over. Four months after the debut of Thunderbolt in Apple's revamped MacBook Pro lineup, storage devices that support Intel's new interconnect technology have finally arrived.
Context & Ripple Effects
Thunderbolt arrived four months ago in Apple's revamped MacBook Pro lineup, and until now the interface had no shipping peripherals — the classic new-standard gap between a host port and anything to plug into it. The Promise Pegasus R6 is the first device to close that gap.
The significance is what the lab numbers say about the old guard: FireWire 800 has been the professional Mac storage interface for years, and a Thunderbolt RAID leaving it dramatically behind confirms what Intel's PCIe-based design promised on paper. The same-day coverage of the technology inside Apple's $50 Thunderbolt cable underlines how much active silicon Apple and Intel put behind making this transition work.
First-order effects
- Buyers of the Promise Pegasus R6 get the first real-world proof that Thunderbolt delivers a step-change in external RAID throughput over FireWire 800, ending the four-month wait for usable Thunderbolt storage.
- FireWire 800's role as the default pro-Mac storage interface is immediately devalued for anyone with a 2011 Thunderbolt-equipped MacBook Pro.
Second-order effects
- Other external-storage vendors now face pressure to ship Thunderbolt products or cede the high-throughput Mac pro market to early movers like Promise.
- Apple's rumored mid-July MacBook Air refresh — reported to add Thunderbolt alongside OS X Lion and Sandy Bridge processors, though unconfirmed — would widen the installed base these peripherals can sell into.
Third-order effects
- The lag between Thunderbolt's February debut and its first peripherals illustrates the structural chicken-and-egg problem every new interconnect standard faces: host ports ship before devices, and the ecosystem only turns once a credible first product proves the bandwidth is real.
- If the pattern holds, Intel's strategy of anchoring new I/O standards in premium laptop lines first — then broadening outward — becomes the template for how PC interconnects get adopted.
The trend: External storage is transitioning from FireWire-era interfaces to PCIe-based interconnects like Thunderbolt, with the peripheral ecosystem following the host ports by roughly a season.