Thunderbolt Pegasus R4 Experience?

I may as well post my experience so far as well. I got a 6-TB R6 two days ago and spent a frustrating couple of days with it. The symptoms I'm experiencing are that the unit becomes unresponsive after a few minutes of use. Not only is it no longer accessible as an external drive (it doesn't unmount, just fails to respond), the Promise Utility fails to even detect it. When this happens, I am unable to power the unit down via its power button but must interrupt power to the unit to get it to shutdown. Once I do that and power up again, it works... for a few minutes. Changing to a diferent TB cable or swapping ports on the R6 or the iMac (mid-2011, 27") made no difference.

I called Promise support this morning and they said they would call me back in an hour. They did, and I described the problem. (I also told them I was unable to register the unit on the Promise support website because it demands a 12-character "TLA number", and the TLA number on the box my unit came in is only 8 characters! The tech performed the registration for me and I can now see it in my online account.)

Once I described the problem, the tech said it sounded like a bad chassis and has issued me an RMA for that. They'll send me a replacement, and we'll see how that goes. (I suspect this is a known failurte mode because as soon as I described it, he stopped asking questions and was ready to issue the RMA.)

This doesn't sound to me like the RF-interference issue some are reporting, but I thought it would be worth posting just to increase the collective knowledge about these units.

An update... Promise sent me a replacement chassis by FedEx and it arrived Monday (next business day). I swapped the drives from the original unit into the new one and it has worked flawlessly since.*

I cloned my internal drive and an external drive I use for photo/video storage to the R6, then rebooted from the R6. In the 2-1/2 days since then, I've been running entirely from the R6 with no issues whatsoever. I couldn't be happier with the product or with the customer service provided by Promise.

* One slight oddity... when I first got the unit it had been sitting outside in the cold for a while. It initially showed an alert because one of the fans was running too slow. The fan speed is dependent on the internal temperature, which is why the fan was running so slowly. As the drive warmed up, the fan speeded up and the alert went away. Just a funny artifact.

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.

Steve - I just got an R4, can you tell me where/how you were able to boot OSx off of it? I'm really curious, do you experience it faster than an SSD would be?

Thanks!

David, it's all detailed in this thread. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3370764

I'm getting 500MBps write and read(Raid 0) and it's way faster than a SSD drive.

My R4 now works perfectly. Promise sent me a new Chassis and nothing hangs and both ports work. I must say that I am very pleased with the service I got from Promise.

Thank you all for your added help and support via this support community. Without you folks I would not have gotten onto the Chassis flaw issue.

Hi ke3z,

I had exactly the same problem as you. I spent two weeks with the Promise Tech guys and none of them could work out the problem. They wanted to send me a new device but I was so put out by the experience (I want an Apple supported $2000 hard drive to work out of the box) that I declined and asked for a refund.

Problem is the Pegagsus is exactly what I need. Could I kindly trouble you to update this posting or me directly (tigerhall (at) gmail.com) on how things are going? Is it still working well for you? And what computer do you use with the Pegasus?

Thanks so much in advance!

Nick

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.)

Are Any of you guys from Europe ? The ones not having problems?

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.

Hi Ke3z,

Thank you so much for writing an update. After hearing from you I agreed to a replacement device and it is working perfectly so far. Fingers crossed. Thanks for the info you shared.

Best,

Nick

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.

Nick, that's great. Here's hoping both of our units continue a long and error-free life!