Final Words

It is clear that the Pegasus2 M4 is a niche product. Any user that does not require portability will be better served by the R4, which is a similar 4-bay Thunderbolt 2 device but with 3.5" hard drives instead of 2.5" drives. As a result it is physically larger but should provide better performance since 3.5" hard drives tend to be faster than their 2.5" siblings. We have not tested the new R4, but we did test the original R6 when it was released and the performance was better than what the M4 offers. The R4 is also more cost efficient and it retails for $1,499 at the Apple Online Store, but that includes 8TB of data so that works out to be $187.50 per terabyte whereas the M4 costs $250 per terabyte.

Furthermore, a single 3.5" external hard drive can beat the M4 in capacity while costing a fraction of the M4's price, and it provides the same or even higher level of portability. That leaves redundancy and performance as the M4's advantages. Since the M4 supports RAID 5 and RAID 6, it can withstand one or two hard drive failures without losing any user data. The performance is also much better than what you can get from single 3.5" drives, which usually max out at around 200MB/s, whereas the M4 manages over 350MB/s in RAID 5 configuration.

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, but WebPAM PRO showed the fan speed to be 2,400rpm, which certainly sounds high. I would not say the noise is too loud to distract me while working, but it is clearly distinguishable over the noise that the three desktops in my office create.

Another thing I have a slight problem with is the lack of additional capacity points. 4TB is not much for a video professional, especially if 4K video is being stored, and 1.5TB and 2TB 2.5" 9.5mm hard drives are not that expensive anymore. A 2TB 2.5" 9.5mm hard drive costs $127 online while a similar 1TB drive costs $65, so the price is exactly double. It is understandable that Promise must have high margins because these are not mainstream products that sell in high volumes and thus I can see the cost sensitivity issue with higher capacities, but a 4x2TB configuration at $1,499 would still leave Promise with a ~50% margin on the hard drives.

All in all, the M4 targets a fairly small niche. I can only think of video professionals (maybe photo and audio to some extent) that would see the value in the M4 because if you do not need portability, redundancy, and high performance, there are better options in the market. However, if you need all three (e.g. for on-set video editing), the M4 does the job.

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