Promise Pegasus R6 (12TB, SATA II)

Pros: 800MBps sustained connectivity, high performance throughput even when running multiple VMs, extremely reliable (sustained deliberate drive removal), quiet considering 6x HDDs running at high speed.

Cons: Cost, although a bit of a red herring here.

Summary: Initially put off by the high price of these against other units that allow you to bring your own drive, a deeper look into the hardware used put this to rights. Yes, this unit costs more than others but this unit has a proper high-speed raid controller, uses *enterprise* class drives in it, and has consistent 24x7 performance.

As for noise, it isn't noisy unless compared to an SSD based unit. The multiple RAID options allow for considerable flexibility as well as tuning, e.g. my unit's running RAID 10 for high speed and recovery though could run RAID 5 for double the storage if desired.

For anyone who needs a very high speed RAID array, doesn't want the power overhead and headache of building a box, and needs the throughput that (currently) only Thunderbolt provides, the Promise R6 is simply a brilliant piece of equipment.

If you regularly work with large data/media/etc., you'd struggle to do better than the Promise R6 at an equivalent price point.