

Note that I said more affordable, and not just affordable. LaCie hopes to offer an alternative for those who want more affordable Thunderbolt storage. As great as the Pegasus is for professionals who need the storage and performance, it's priced too high for most consumers who also want fast external storage. Less than $500 of that $2K bill is the retail cost of the hard drives, the rest is all chassis, controller hardware and of course manufacturer profit. And the top of the line 12TB model is priced at $2000. Want the 6-bay version? That'll be $1500. In its cheapest configuration, the 4TB Pegasus R4 with four 1TB 3.5" HDDs will set you back a cool grand. There are just two problems with Thunderbolt today: 1) It's practically only available on Macs, and 2) the Promise Pegasus is extremely expensive. We proved this in our Pegasus R6 review where we sustained transfer rates of 1GB/s (8Gbps) from an array of five SF-2281 SSDs. Thunderbolt is the absolute fastest consumer interface available for users who want high-speed external storage.
