Comments Locked

39 Comments

Back to Article

  • Zak - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link

    The 4xSSD performance is a little disappointing indeed. That would be #1 reason to get this enclosure. I get faster speeds, over 1GB/s reads, out of two SSDs on the onboard Intel RAID controller.
  • simonrichter - Friday, October 3, 2014 - link

    I agree, it is rather disappointing and it makes it an average storage devices that cannot match up to the top ones on the market (for example http://www.consumertop.com/best-computer-storage-g... ). But it should be interesting to see if they release an updated version of it.
  • jonb8305 - Wednesday, October 15, 2014 - link

    Promise has an SSD version of the m4 with way better performance than what was stated here.
  • bill.rookard - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link

    While I do somewhat see the use of a device like this, I'm not sure I see it really serving any real niche effectively.

    It's made to use small, portable drives, but it's not portable as it requires external power.
    It should be quick, but it's limited by the internals to about 1/4 of it's theoretical top speed.
    It uses the expensive Thunderbolt interface to be fast, but again, it's limited internally.
    It offers four drives, but keeps them to 2.5" drives without making the unit truly portable.
    It offers four drives for capacity, but then only offers 1TB drives.

    This device just seems like a whole series of compromises without really SERVING a niche effectively.
  • JohnMD1022 - Tuesday, September 16, 2014 - link

    Why not offer it as a bare box?
  • Drizzt321 - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link

    How about running the SSDs as single disks and using Windows RAID to check performance. Cut out the RAID controller, which them will leave us the SATA controller to test that to see if it's the RAID controller, or the SATA controller.

    And I agree, it's too bad it can't be bus-powered. Maybe when USB3.1 with Type-C connectors comes along it'd be able to power something like this. 100W is quite a bit of power, especially with 2.5" drives!
  • repoman27 - Sunday, September 14, 2014 - link

    If Kristian was correct in his guess that there's a PMC-Sierra PM8011 lurking under that heat sink, which is quite likely seeing as Promise uses that chip in several other products already, it's an RoC (RAID-on-Chip). So the SATA (actually SAS in this case) controller and the RAID controller aren't terribly separable.

    The performance scaling actually looks damn near perfect with the HDDs, and indicates that the RoC is actually a beast for the intended workload. I'm not sure why Kristian thought RAID 5 read performance would be higher. If you only stripe across three drives and write parity data to the 4th, it would be pretty challenging to read back faster than 3x the maximum a single drive can muster. In this case, the Pegasus2 M4 hit 355.5 MB/s vs. 120 MB/s for a single drive, or near as makes no difference 3x. And the 15% performance hit for sequential reads in RAID 10 doesn't seem too egregious, especially seeing as random reads went up by almost 17%.

    Kristian never mentioned what he was using for SSDs or if they were all identical. I'm guessing whatever he used, the RoC simply wasn't tuned for it. Although who knows, maybe the same test on a Mac would have yielded radically different results.

    100 W may be a lot for 4x 2.5-inch HDDs, but the Pegasus2 M4 appears to be packing a compact internal 110 W PSU from FSP. That's nuts!
  • HigherState - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link

    I know they say performance on win vs mac should be close, however those numbers are so dissapointing that its possible that its os driver related as well. Someones bound to have an old MBP to lend you for the test
  • repoman27 - Sunday, September 14, 2014 - link

    Well, the performance of the unit as it shipped isn't really disappointing at all. I mean, aside from not using something slightly peppier than the Toshiba drives, like maybe HGST Travelstar 7K1000's, what was Promise supposed to do?

    Clearly the SSD experiment was performed with a set of drives that had in no way been validated against Promise's firmware.
  • The_Assimilator - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link

    Or you could spend $700 on four 7200rpm 4TB 3.5" drives and a cheap RAID controller card, and build a RAID-10 setup that also wouldn't be portable, but would be fast and have 8 times the capacity of this POS.
  • repoman27 - Monday, September 15, 2014 - link

    Well, you clearly missed the point then. Promise already makes a whole line of 3.5-inch DAS offerings.

    The Pegasus2 M4 is very nearly the same in both size and weight to a stack of 4 bare 3.5-inch drives, yet it comes with 4 hot-swap drive bays, an internal 110 W PSU, a custom hardware RAID controller, and a 4-channel Thunderbolt 2 interface so you can daisy-chain up to 6 of them. The RoC is an 8-Port, 6Gb/s SAS / SATA chip with a PCIe 2.0 x8 back end, paired with 512 MB of DDR2-800 ECC SDRAM, 8 MB of external NAND, and a Lattice MachX02 PLD, all of which is arguably overkill for the intended application.

    The bottom line is that this "POS" extracts 100% of the potential of the drives it ships with, delivers peak performance beyond what is possible via USB 3.0, and does so as a single device that costs a grand. There are a *lot* of highly questionable Thunderbolt storage devices out there, but this really isn't one of them.
  • PeterBr - Sunday, May 3, 2015 - link

    Im new to this and have to build a drive for 4k video editing. Do you have a raid controller card in mind that you could point me to? I just bought this M4 last night and now Im considering returning for something more affordable.
  • CalaverasGrande - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link

    Not to be snarky, but really, what is the point of testing it at all if you can not beg borrow or steal a Mac? There may not be significant differences from your perspective. However the target audience for this product is Mac owners.

  • twotwotwo - Saturday, September 13, 2014 - link

    They do have Thunderbolt and aren't saturating the interface; I don't see the problem unless you would choose to buy or not based on the software.
  • WylyQuimby - Saturday, September 13, 2014 - link

    CalverasGrande has a point. Thunderbolt doesn't exactly have the best support on Windows. I have two TB drives. One is not recognized at all by Win8.1 and the other has to be plugged in before booting. For a good scientific test one should try to eliminate all systematic errors. TB devices are primarily purchased by Mac users, one should at least also test them on a Mac.
  • Osamede - Saturday, September 13, 2014 - link

    I must agree. It is great to see a Windows based analysis of this. Very useful. But........at the same time, the primary user base is on Mac OSX and it is a major omission to see a review that completely ignores that side the equation.

    Furthermore, there are other omissions, which are material to the type of user who would consider the product:
    - No discussion of drive height limits e.g. can I stick a 12 or 15mm height 2.5" drive in here
    - No discussion of noise/fan

    And the conclusion should have touched upon other similar products which use 2.5" drives and said something even brief about how this one here stacks up in performance, functionality and value compared to those.

    Overall this "review" was a bit on the shallow side and just not good enough IMO.
  • Death666Angel - Saturday, September 13, 2014 - link

    "- No discussion of drive height limits e.g. can I stick a 12 or 15mm height 2.5" drive in here
    - No discussion of noise/fan"
    First page specifically calls out 9.5mm drives. It does not mention 12.5mm or 15mm height in any way. I derive from that, that they aren't supported.
    Furthermore, in the conclusion, the article mentions the loud noise the fan makes.
  • Osamede - Saturday, September 13, 2014 - link

    Ok let me rephrase that. This is Anandtech - I expect more substance than this:

    "I did notice one irritating thing in the M4, however. The fan in the M4 makes a fairly loud noise even when the device is idling. Unfortunately I do not have a proper decibel meter to provide an objective measure of the noise."

    I mean just put out some numbers please. No numbers and there is no way one can compare this with the next product you review in two weeks. The objective and comparable approach is one major reason why people come here.

    Fair enough?
  • Gigaplex - Saturday, September 13, 2014 - link

    It stated fairly explicitly that they didn't have a meter to record numbers. Would you like them to make up some numbers?
  • Osamede - Sunday, September 14, 2014 - link

    Maybe your comprehension not very good - my point is they should have one and do document the numbers. Like I said, just not good enough.

    Worse yet is apologists for half-done "review".
  • Kristian Vättö - Sunday, September 14, 2014 - link

    I hope you understand that there is no central AnandTech office with every possible gadget and tool at our disposal. I don't have any other Thunderbolt enclosures since this was my first TB review, so I wouldn't have anything to compare the M4 to. Anand used to run our Thunderbolt coverage since he had the best tools for that, and it will take some time before we get everything migrated.
  • melgross - Sunday, September 14, 2014 - link

    You couldn't get the site to cough up $40? Or use your smartphone. There are plenty of apps that measure sound levels. I can't speak to the accuracy of Android apps because there are so many phone models out there that they may not all be calibrated. But the ones for the iPhone, such as Audio Tools, also available for Android, is. Mine measures within 1db of my lab meter.
  • melgross - Sunday, September 14, 2014 - link

    I forgot to mention that using an app such as Audio Tools is better because you can also use the very accurate spectrum analyse tool. This is important for useful noise testing because all noise is not equal. Low frequency noise doesn't sound as loud to us as mid frequencies and higher frequencies do. This shows a live reading chart. Also great for detecting hum, and other spikey noises. You can also save the chart and put into the review.
  • bigboxes - Monday, September 15, 2014 - link

    I don't comment on everything. However, Anand is gone. You've got to stop using him as an excuse as to why you don't do someting. Move on. It's almost painful reading your comments. Yes, Anand is gone. Now, it's time for you to move on.
  • melgross - Sunday, September 14, 2014 - link

    Is like them to spend $40 and buy a meter which is accurate to within a couple of dbx such as the Radio Shack model. At least we would get some idea of how loud it is. It doesn't need to be exact.
  • Kristian Vättö - Sunday, September 14, 2014 - link

    I definitely want to test with a Mac because obviously that is the target market of Thunderbolt products. Unfortunately I don't have one at my disposal and since I have to spend my own money on it, I want to make sure that what I buy is worth it in my opinion (I currently have a 2010 MBA, but it's still serving me fine so I haven't seen a need to upgrade yet).
  • colinstu - Saturday, September 13, 2014 - link

    I'd love to see four WD1000CHTZ thrown in this puppy and see how it compares. (10k RPM, SATA 1TB drives). They're 9.5mm too just like the ones used here. Or take a WD1000DHTZ and take the 2.5->3.5 "icepack" off.
  • jseliger2 - Sunday, September 14, 2014 - link

    <i>While there are arguably cheaper and larger external 3.5" hard drives around</i>

    There was just a thread about this issue over at Ars Technica: http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=19&am... , and I"m curious about what those other external drive bays might be. Arsians list an OWC option, a Western Digital version, and a Drobo version. They're all costly. Are there other alternatives?
  • Kristian Vättö - Sunday, September 14, 2014 - link

    I meant external HDDs in general, including USB 3.0 ones. If you are just looking for a single drive, then USB 3.0 is fine because a 3.5" HDD cannot saturate the USB 3.0 interface anyway. It's only when you start doing RAID (or SSDs) that Thunderbolt becomes beneficial.
  • jseliger2 - Sunday, September 14, 2014 - link

    I meant external HDDs in general

    Oh—I see.

    I'm still curious about the multi-bay enclosure space, since those multi-bay enclosures still seem to be shockingly expensive. Perhaps that will remain true: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8529/idf-2014-where-... , but I'd like it not to be. As they say in that Ars thread, the four-bay Thunderbolt Drobos are about twice the price of the equivalent USB 3 model.
  • joystone324 - Sunday, September 14, 2014 - link

    no man
  • johnny_boy - Monday, September 15, 2014 - link

    Why on Earth couldn't they make this thing use less than 10W? Each drive uses less than a watt so that leaves 6 watts left for the controller. It could be done entirely through software off an ARM SoC running linux!
  • repoman27 - Monday, September 15, 2014 - link

    This unit ships with 2.5-inch spinning disks that draw 2.5 W each when in use and over 3 W at startup. Even with staggered startup, you're at 10 W right there. Then there's the PMC-Sierra RoC, which judging by the heat sink might draw around 5 W without counting the SDRAM and NAND, and the DSL5520 Thunderbolt 2 controller which needs 2.8 W. There's also a rather large PLD and a Parade PS181 DP to DP++ converter that need juice. Since this is a two-port design, the PSU also has to be able to provide 10 W of power to the next device in the chain.

    Speaking of the 10 W power budget, that also has to power an active cable, which only leaves "up to 8.5 W" for the device. Since the original Thunderbolt cables could draw over 2.4 W all by themselves, and the lowest power Thunderbolt 2 controller uses another 2.1 W, you can really only count on roughly 5 W for your device design unless you use a tethered cable.
  • philipma1957 - Monday, September 15, 2014 - link

    I own an r-6 and it has been a beast. One of the most important features of the r-6 is the drives are bootable. I own the smaller 2.5 inch 4 drive model the j4 and it is not bootable. the j4 fan was loud and whiny it sets in a box doing nothing. It was designed to stack under a mac mini and it was very disappointing purchase for me. I would hate to buy this unit and find it is not bootable. and has the same whiny loud fan. And if I was doing video since I have to plug this into a power source I would just get an r-4 or r-6 and use that. The r-6 can have a lot of setups that are fast and back up your info.
  • mschira - Tuesday, September 16, 2014 - link

    this is silly. Why would I bother with a RAID setup for 4 TB, when I can get a 4TB single platter in 3.5"?
    That's gonna be smaller than 4 2.5" drives, consume less power, and on goes the list of advantages.
    Yea, it's somewhat less fail tolerant because I can't use RAID 5, but it will fail much less often because it is only ONE drive rather than 4 drives.
    But seriously? RAID 5 will give you 3TB. How about using two 2TB 2.5" drives in RAID 1? Will be more compact, fail less often.

    Now use 2TB 2.5" drives (i.e. 12mm ones) and the situation starts to turn. You can build a 6GB RAID 5 setup with good speed fault tolerance and a reasonable size.
    May not be a magic bullet in many occasions, but at least in a few situations.
    Cheers
    M.
  • RedHunter2386 - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link

    Please keep in mind that PMC is part of Promise Technology and is also known at the "OEM"-brand of Promise. Therefor it is not that strange they would use their own chip in their devices, even if the specs are higher than the unit actually demands.

    On the Promise booth at IBC (in Amsterdam), they were showing the Pegasus M4 with 4x 512GB Samsung 840 EVO SSDs. This was a demo unit, as there is no official SSD version available (yet). The speeds in Blackmagic Speed Test were showing around 1100MB/s Write and 1150 MB/s read. That's quite a difference from the speeds mentioned in this review.
  • stux - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link

    I think this review needs an update or a Redux

    For a TB drive enclosure its absolutely imperative to test it on a Mac with TB2, or you might as well not bother, especailly with the reports for 1100/1150MB/s performance with 4x 840 Evo SSDs.

    Drive noise is a very big concern with a product like this. I've seen dB meter apps for iPhones, and audio engineer friend of mine raves about one and how its with in point something something of his lab meter. Cheap, and cheerful and would help a lot with objectively quantifying the noise.

    This drive sounds like its trying to compete with the Drobo Mini, which has 4 2.5" bays and an m-sata 5 bay which can act like a cache card, and is USB3 and TB

    I'd really really like to see a performance comparison between the drobo mini and the the M4 with 4x 1 or 2TB HDs and also with SSDs. That would be very interesting, and very valuable to mac professionals trying to work out high performance or high capacity storage solutions for portable scenarios.

    Thanks Kristian, I did enjoy the review :)
  • jonb8305 - Wednesday, October 15, 2014 - link

    Someone should do an update with the official SSD version from Promise http://www.promise.com/promotion_page/promotion_pa...
  • PeterBr - Sunday, May 3, 2015 - link

    I just placed an order for a PROMISE Pegasus2 M4 4TB at $1500 (this is a 2.5" disk version), and now Im thinking I could have purchased a 3.5" version from another company with more TB installed for the same price. Could anyone recommend a better prices/deal and reliable 8TB or higher raid drive with thunderbolt for 4k video editing?

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now