This morning Apple finally announced availability of its first Thunderbolt cable alongside Promise's Pegasus external RAID solution. We've previewed the Pegasus in the past but today we received a shipping model of the 6-bay 12TB.

The packaging isn't quite as nice as what we're used to from Apple, but the device inside is really what matters. The R6 comes with six removable drive bays capable of accepting both 2.5" and 3.5" drives. 

There are two LEDs per drive bay as well as power and Thunderbolt LEDs on the left side of the device:

The Pegasus is audible thanks to its six hard drives and two fans, but it's not what I'd consider loud.

Promise is announcing availability of four different configurations of the Pegasus available via Apple's online store:

All of the available Pegasus systems ship with 7200RPM 3.5" hard drives, although Promise mentioned that we will may see SSD enabled configurations in the future. The 12TB R6 we received uses six Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 2TB drives (HDS723020BLA642) in a 9.7TB RAID-5 configuration. The 7K3000 spins its four platters at 7200RPM and buffers data with a 64MB on-board cache. The drive has a 6Gbps SATA interface although the Pegasus R4/R6 supports SAS drives as well. All of the Pegasus devices ship in RAID 5 however they do support RAID-0/1/5/50/6/10.

I had no problems creating data on the Pegasus array at up to 688MB/s

The 2 meter Thunderbolt cable is also finally available at $49.99. The cable is compatible with all 2011 MacBook Pros as well as the 2011 iMac.

We'll be testing the Pegasus R6 over the coming days, stay tuned for our review!