The folks over at Macworld got one of the new Pegasus R6 RAID systems in for testing and put it through its paces. The testing proved to be a huge win for Thunderbolt, which showed a massive improvement over FireWire 800 and just decimated USB 2.0.
Macworld used two systems, a 15-inch i5 MacBook Pro and an i5 iMac, to test the read and write speeds of a Thunderbolt connection versus comparable RAID systems running on FireWire 800, FW400 and USB 2.0. The tests showed incredible improvements in read speed and write speed on system tests and sustained file transfers.
As an example, the AJA tests on the Pegasus R6 equipped with Thunderbolt showed an 11.5x increase over the FW800 connected SmartStor DS4600. Even though the SmartStor uses less drives, 4 versus the 6 in the Pegasus, and is most likely a tad slower as a result, that’s still an impressive result.
You can see the full set of tests over at Macworld, including the chart where USB 2.0 gets outperformed by a factor of 20 by Thunderbolt. We’re looking forward to getting some Thunderbolt drives in to test ourselves and this just makes us that much more excited.
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