Thunderbolt Pegasus R4 Experience?

Promise got my problems ironed out on Feb 6th and I haven't had a problem since.

Getting another Apple TB cable helped. I did this right at the Apple store genius bar and it started working.

Promise followed through with additional support.

No problems since then

I have a MacBook PRO and an external 27" Display.

I can eject the Pegasus and reconnect and it works without powering down and up.

I really like the product for Adobe CS5 and Illustrator.

Nick,

I'm sorry you had such problems with Promise. Based on the entries in this thread, I guess you aren't the only one, but maybe they've gotten religion on customer service because my experience was different. (You probably should have taken them up on the replacement device offer, though!)

Two weeks after getting it, the R6 is still working flawlessly for me. I've been booting from it and using it as my only disk drive (other than Time Machine backups). I'm using it with a mid-2011 27" iMac (3.4 GHz i7).

You're right, there isn't any other product quite like the Pegasus on the market at present. I find Final Cut Pro X to run much more smoothly than it did when all I had was the internal drive.

Edited to say: I'm also daisy-chaining an older Apple Cinema display from the R6 via a mini-DP-to-DVI adapter, and that has worked flawlessly, too. I'm doing the daisy chain because the second TB port of the iMac is already driving a display. (Yes, I have two external displays plus the iMac's screen... in my day job as a software developer I need to keep a VM running windows on one screen, a second screen for Skype and softphone displays and web/email, and the main screen for my development environment.)

I am in the UK and I was having problems.

I have spoken to Apple and Promise many times about the issue.

I had a R6 Chassis replaced but still saw problems.

In the end I asked both Apple and Promise again to look into the issues.

Apple has yet to respond (perhaps no surprise maybe but it's a shame), Apple were great when I went in store though.. but Promise (Who have replied every time I placed a case with them) stated that the issue was with the chassis so they replaced it again.

That was over a month ago and I have not seen issues with the R6 since.

I therefore firmly think that its the Chassis (since I got everything else changed in my config.)

Hope that helps.

I'm in the US.

We have a 1.5 month old Pegasus R6, connected (via the left TB port) to an i7 Mini Server running 10.7.3. It has disconnected every time we've tried to do very large transfers (200+ GB) to it.

Every. Time.

When the R6 dropped offline, it was completely unresponsive. The power button wouldn't work no matter how long it was held in, and the R6 wouldn't be available even after rebooting the server unless we pulled the plug on the R6 to force it to restart. Until it restarted, the Promise utility wouldn't even run; there was no UI, just an unresponsive menu bar.

Initially, it seemed to be because of a bad drive module. After a fairly extensive support call with Promise, we discovered and pulled the bad drive module and the RAID restarted. The support tech was delighted to find we'd set up the unit as RAID5 with a hot spare, since most people apparently use it as RAID5 with all available drives, the way it comes out of the box. The RAID rebuilt, but the problem continued whenever we tried a big file transfer; the RAID would drop offline and the server would hang.

We RMA'd the bad drive, but still haven't received the replacement a week later. A second RAID module has now "died". I put that in quotes because Promise support said their firmware marks a drive as "dead" when it has too many errors; to me, that usually means it needs to be reformatted and any bad sectors remapped.

The RAID is now running in degraded condition; another failure will render it completely unusable. I can't help feeling that frequently unplugging the drive -- as necessary as it was to get the thing mounted and visible to the OS -- contributed to the errors that dropped the second module offline.

I have long experience in tech. Two drive module failures in a new unit is a heck of a coincidence. And the way the Pegasus R6 responds to errors by dropping offline and freezing is ridiculous; there's no way that's acceptable in a production system. It makes no sense that we're seeing less stability from a RAID5 (with a hot spare!) than a single cheap FireWire HD.

I'll contact Promise support again today to see what they can do for me, but I'm really close to flinging the Pegasus R6 out a window.

asasaki, that sounds exactly like the problem I experienced, and it was resolved by getting a new unit, not by replacing drives. In fact, the original drives are in the new unit and have worked fine since the unit was replaced.

To me, both the fact that the power button won't shut down the unit and the inability of the utility to communicate with the drive argue for a more systemic failure than a drive issue, and that's borne out by the fact that my problem had the exact same symptoms and was resolved by getting a new unit.

I would demand a replacement unit if I were you.

As it turns out, we did ask for a replacement unit (thanks for nudging me in that direction, ke3z), and sent the R6 back with an RMA this morning. Hopefully, that's the end of it. Promise support was very helpful, they were open to the return and did everything they could to assist.

This whole thread has genuinely put me off Thunderbolt. Call me crazy, but there don't seem to be too many different NAS RAID solution vendors out there. Yes, it may just be the Pegasus unit, but the posts about shielding the cable doing the trick are worrying.

As it stands, this (TB) is simply not production technology.

Until that gets addressed and taken seriously by both Apple and its TB device partners...I won't be investing in an R6. In the meantime, it's hurting confidence and uptake of TB tech.

Drobo gets my money.

Shame. It has so much promise. (Pun intended)

Cheers,

Wim

And don't forget to do the important 'Firmware UPDATE', after the normal update you do a second update check and the system shows the Firmware Update.

Download the firmware update, install it true the Promise Utility, confirm it. Than do a shutdown of your Pegasus Unit wait 1 min and restart the unit. Now the Firmware is installed into the Unit.

Our units works PERFECT! We don't have any problems any more! This systems rocks! We have 2 units from 12 TB with 6 drives. Both connected to our iMac 27" computer true Thunderbolt. PERFECT EN SOLID NOW!!!

Thanks for the input. So nobody has seen any adverse effects from this update?

My R4 is and has been working perfectl since I got it several months ago so I'm relouctatnt to monkey around with it.

Has anyone else done this update proceadure and had no adverse effects?

Where do I update the firmware as previoulsy mentioned?

Thanks,

Steve

I performed the utility and firmware updates yesterday to a fully working R6. So far, no problems. (I'm booting from my R6 and using it as my sole storage.)

Once you've updated the utility, just do a "Check for Updates" again from the Promise Utility menu and it should detect the firmware update and let you apply it.

Prior to the utility update I was seeing an over-temperature warning on the backplane sensor. That's no longer there, but I think it's because they simply changed the warning range. Before, I think it triggered at 46° C. Now it triggers at 50° C. The current temperature on my unit is 47° C. I didn't notice if there were other changes.

Just completed the Promise utility and the R4 firmware upgrade!

This is fantastic!.. full marks to promise on this one!

For those of us who boot from the promise, you now don't even need to touch the R4/6 power switch. Just switch on the Mac and the R4/6 detects the mac and starts up from cold. Same deal in reverse for a power down!

I've just set my disk drive to sleep in power options.. I wonder if it allows the R4/6 to sleep and how it wakes up?

Steve

Boy this is a dumb newbie question ... Do I use Disk Utility to manage partitions as I would on any other piece of Mac storage? I was reading the Pegasus manual download and somehow got a bit of ambiguity. I mean it ships as a single HFS+ volume with the RAID Level 5.

thanks,

david m.

levindenboer1975, I was read this thread in it's entirety and noticed it kind of stalled around March 6th. I continued to watch the thread to see if there was a solution for the problems/issues people had been posting. My interest lyed in the fact I had just sold my 1 year old iMac and purchased a new 27" iMac with ThunderBolt with the intent to buy a Promise Pegasus R6, so this thread was disappointing to say the least. But today to read your post was encouraging enough that I am ready to purchase. Your last post was March 20th and today (for me) is March 27th, and I would like to know are things still ROCK SOLID?

Hello Poucedeleon,

Our units are still ROCK SOLID!!!! We have 2 Pegasus R6 12 TB units, the ones with six drives. And it works PERFECT!!! Unbelievable fast en solid.

Greetings from the Netherlands, Levin den Boer.

Hello David,

To change the RAID configuration, use the Promise Utility. You can also format the drive at that time, but if you want something different (like multiple partitions on a volume), use the OS X Disk Utility.