Thunderbolt Pegasus R4 Experience?

Oh man,

Had it working ONCE, put a bunch of info on it and now it just sits there orange light. The thunderbolt blue light on the front comes on but in the system report on my imac i7 it lists under thunderbolt no connections and when it connected it used to show a connection 2 result.

Waiting for Promise to get back to me but AARRRRGHHHH!!! how frustrating. Tried every combination of thunderbolt cables directions to ports etc etc.. restarting etc etc.. got it working once but now it just sits there

looking at me with its evil orange light..

what do you suggest i do people.? whats the fastest way to get a result out of Promise?

Mark

I'll add my experience.

I got my R4 and started seeing random disconnects within a week. No dead drives. When the R4 was online all the systems checked out OK. The system log never displayed the correct date and time -- always showing the unit powering on in 1970 or so. Sometimes when the R4 went offline I couldn't physically power it off: I had to yank the power plug from the back.

- noticed a pattern; if the R4 was turned off for several hours it would work longer without disconnects. However, once the first disconnect happens it becomes increasing in frequency until it only stays online for 20-30 minutes at a time. Sometimes the unit worked properly up to 15 hours initially, but the disconnects always returned eventually.

- bought a new TB cable. This changed nothing.

- covered by TB cable in tinfoil. This changed nothing.

- Contacted Promise. Got an RMA and they shipped me a brand new chasis. This changed nothing. Initial great experience for 1-2 days, followed by the same disconnect pattern described above.

- Contacted Apple. Got a new Retina Macbook Pro, just in case mine was botched. This changed nothing.

- Further contacted Promise, they asked me to disable the power management with a terminal command, citing that this fixed issues for some users. This changed nothing. Same pattern of 1-2 days operating normally, then the disconnecting pattern as usual.

- Did some more online research.... found this forum 😟 This is where I am now.

Hello Infotech,

After we send an email to the Promise Technology here in Eindhoven the Netherlands the called us back. And after a while the told us to connect the R6 with the thunderbolt cable to the left port.

So we dit! And unbelievable but the system works perfect now?

So if that's the trick wy worries any futher. It runs perfect on our iMac now. It's online now for several day's and no problems at all now.

Our iMac is the main machine with all the Aperture Library's. This contain only the previews of our images.

The real images are stored on our R6. And the Vaults we have made for each Aperture Library are stored on our Deonet 1.5 Tb Raid Hot Swappable drives. And we are totaly relying on the Raid5 of the Pegasus R6.

Spent an hour and a half on a craft project. Fun for the whole family !

1.5" foil strips. Full coverage. Shrink wrap ends.........

Bubkus !

Doesn't work. Sole device plugged into my 9 mo. old MacBook PRO.... nada.

What does it take for this company to realize I have a defective product?

Again,

Many thanks to everyone that posted.

Just curious - did you check to ensure that you dont have "put hard disks to sleep" checked? No one else has seemed to of noted whether or not they do.

If it's NOT checked and your still having issues then I'm not sure. But doing so fixed my problems so far.

Hello Thunderbolt Pegasus users....

Today Promise released an update for the Promise Utility. Open the Utility and it pop's up with a screen that ask for the update. Do this to keep the pegasus units up to date.

As I said, we tried everything in this thread but still had disappearances. After reading other’s problems with thunderbolt on Lacie’s site and basically everywhere, I wrapped my thunderbolt cord in a double layer of aluminum foil. I felt like an idiot, it looks crazy but I haven’t had a dismount since. Not one, no glitch or problem. Coincidence? Don’t know. I tried it out of desperation but it seems to have worked. If everyone here tries it and it works, we could be on to something. Costs nothing.

I had also the big problem to delete the master images from Aperture. So i started an new discussion and the things i did there were amazing. After all those things the Pegasus is working fine now for a couple of day's now.

And we are using it very intens. We shoot about over 1000 images a day and all those images are stored on the Pegasus R6.

If you go to this disscussion you will see what i mean; https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3142403?answerId=16082385022#16082385022

Thanks a lot for your engagement Infotech 24 7. That's really great and more than I could expect. There is an Apple support document (http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3775) that made me beleave to use the iMac 2011 as Display nearly the same way as a Tunderbolt Display. This would have been the perfect sollution for me.

I had this issue in the beginning with R6. After applying Apple's TB updates it's gone. I installed all the latest and greatest updates from Apple and Promise. It has been solid. Now I have two Thunderbolt diplays and have this new issue:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3608517

😟

In answer to

Steve McRea

Re: Thunderbolt Pegasus R4 Experience?

My Pegasus is configured as a RAID 10.

I understand than that you have two pairs of disks as Raid 0 mirrored one pair into the other. I used to have a similar configuration with my Pegasus 6, that is two sets of three disks each as Raid 0 mirrored into an identical set for a total of six disks.

Everything was ok until I was hit by the self-ejection accident, and after that I decided to stop using Raid on the Pegasus.

But I had been reading on various places that using a Raid set as startup disk was not a good idea, since the gain in transfer speed would be offset against increasing latency, and latency is the most important factor in the performance of the operating system, where accesses to the disk are very frequent but only for small chunks of data,

This would require the shortest possible access time or latency, while transfer speed impact would be negligible.

I am not an expert myself, I just rely on opinions by people in the know, and I would be pleased if somebody would like to share his experience.

It seems Disk Utility and the R6 "don't understand each other" very well. There is a thread on MacOS X disk utility not being able to expand a partition on an R6 expanded logical volume. I wouldn't be surprised if the problems [RackZoZing] describes are of a similar nature. Hope Apple looks into this thoroughly, as Pegasus units are one of the few (Apple sold!) reasonably affordable, serioulsy sized and speedy solutions.

As I’ve mentioned previously on this thread.. my R4 has been running flawlessly since October last year (touch wood). The only heart stopping issues so far have been self imposed:

• - All Red lights Appeared next to each drive. Reason: 2 year old son ejected all of the drives 😁
• - Latest OSx update for some reason decided to set my startup drive back to the internal imac drive and not the promise???

Apart from that it’s been running great!

I love running OSx from the Promise… a big reason is that when you have an issue such as the startup drive changing for no reason I simply fired up OSx on the internal drive and started to debug. Quickly noticed from Disk utils that the promise was nicely mounting and singing like a bird. I think that this will be a really useful feature as time goes by. I can imagine running utils like disk warrior from my internal drive if I ever have more serious drive issues with the promise.

It really looks like getting good or bad HW is luck of the draw. It sounds like Promise are waking up to the fact that they may have screwed up in the manufacturing process and are RMA’ing chassis with no questions asked. I certainly hope that they have done a root cause analysis on the issue and it is no longer seen on units coming off the line now.

Hi Steve,

I have Hitachi HDS72302 in my R4 in RAID0 configuration. I have allways at least 3 copies of my data so I have configured this array as fast as possible - and it is really fast!

The sleep mode is working with the latest firmware. You can check it this way:

1. Open System Preferences and then select Energy saver option and then see whether the first option is checked (Put the disks to sleep mode when unused)
2. Press Cmd + Option + Eject button on the keyboard to force Mac to go to sleep (when you do it, you should see the Thunderbolt indicators on R4 go off)
3. Wait for 20 minutes - after that, you will hear harddisks spinning off
4. And after a while, you will hear only fan spinning in the Promise array (and that`s my complain to Promise - in my opinion when all disks are off there is no need to spin the fan so I expect it will stop spinning in the next firmware update)
5. When you press any key, Mac will awake from the sleep mode, Thunderbolt indicators on Promise will light on and you will hear beep sound and drives starting to spin

You should double-check the sleep mode of your Mac. The problem is that it really goes to sleep only when absolutely no activity is taken. If you for example have an e-mail client running or some web page with auto-update (like Facebook), then there is some network activity preventing Mac from going to sleep. So I recommend pressing Cmd + Option + Eject (or select Mac menu and Sleep command).

Pavel