Thunderbolt Pegasus R4 Experience?

Has anyone else got any first hand experience of the Promise Pegasus R4 (or R6) with their iMac? I bought mine this week and managed to load it up with around 1.4Tb (it holds around 3Tb) no problem. Now, today I can't get the drive to stay connected before it ejects for more than 5 minutes. It's driving me mad and I'm very concerned as I moved all my family video onto it from another drive and it won't stay connected long enough to get it back onto another drive again.

iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8), 2011 i7 3.4, 256Gb SSD and 16Gb RAM

Posted on Jul 16, 2011 8:38 AM

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455 replies

May 21, 2013 3:41 AM in response to Infotech 24 7

Hi All, I live in Europe and yes my Peagasus started to umount itself, I had a quick read thru the threads and I believe I found the problem, please bear with me.

I was indeed charging my mobile phone on the small table and moving it across the room solved my problem. It appears that the thunderbold interface super fast as it is, can be disrupted by RFI (radio freq interference) i.e. spurious glitches radiated from other equipment or cables.


Solutions

  • Move all radiating equipment as far away from the peaguses, phones if you charging them, old style CRT displays etc.
  • Carefully re route your thunderbolt cable away from other cables, in my setup it was lying with the other cables, a few mains cables, firewire cables etc. - Disconnect it and give it its own route or path with perhaps a few centimeters/inchs isolation from other cables.


All those little power supplies that run your external hard drives or charge you gadgets (wireless mouse, tablet etc). These little supplies are known as switch mode supplies and they generate crap that is radiated, so move the thunderbolt cable away from everything if you can.


Too many earth conncections can also cause problems, know as circulating earth currents, whereby the actual earth or screen of a cable starts carrying the disruptive signal by accident.

Solution Plug your Peaguses into a different mains outlet across the room, even if you have to use an extension lead.

This is a common enough problem in industry.


I would lay the problem down to poor leads and yes for extream cases the tinfoil solution does work but only conncect the foil to one end. i.e run the foil say from the Peaguses touching the case right to the mac but dont let the foil touch the mac stop short by a inch or so this stops the circulating earth current from flowing whilst earthing the tinfoil at one end.


Hope this helps...and makes sense 🙂

Jan 30, 2012 11:43 PM in response to levindenboer1975

levindenboer1975 wrote:


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?


User uploaded file


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.


Is this true??!! This seems very amateur if so. I was hoping to use both ports; one for my iMac 27" and the other for my MacBook Air.

Jul 30, 2011 6:03 AM in response to Infotech 24 7

Hello infotech,


We have the same problem here with the new iMac 27" and the Pegasus R6 from Promise. After a while i just pops out of the desktop and you will get the error message from apple that the drive is not removed correctly from the desktop. Yes i know! But i didn't remove the disk!!

It's very onstable it looks like. We are working in Aperture 3.1.3 and thant....plof disk gone! AAAAAAAHHHH!!!!


So we have write to Promise Technology our problem but we didn't get an response! So we don't know what to do now.... this stuff is bought just 1 week ago!


Greetings Levin den Boer.

Aug 4, 2011 8:23 AM in response to Infotech 24 7

I have two Promise SmartStor raids connected via firewire 800 that keep disconnecting on thier own without warning. It happened on both a pre and post Thunderbolt MacMini. The whole reason I purchased the Thunderbolt R6 was for performance and reliability. Reading this thread is getting me very alarmed.

Wondering if it's an OS X software or general Promise hardware controller issue...

Aug 4, 2011 9:31 AM in response to chiudesign

All I can say is that I've received a replacement and after 48 hours it's still ok but I'm still holding my breath. When I had the original plugged into a MacBook Pro for a week it never once ejected. It's only when connected to a new iMac it appears to have a problem.


I wouldn't discount the problem being an iMac Thunderbolt issue that needs resolving.

Aug 4, 2011 11:02 AM in response to chiudesign

I realy don't know! But with 12 Terrabyte i'm secure for at least the next 5 years. And after 5 years there will be something els, what is faster, bigger and better. So i'm not worrying about connecting another drive to that port.

But for other people it's a question.


But i think that the system what drives the disks is build to send and recieve data true the ports in an way that it understand the system. So if you connect an second R4 or R6 those systems recogniza each other and the promise utility will fixed the connection... i think!

Aug 6, 2011 12:23 AM in response to levindenboer1975

Well UPDATE time, Mine has ejected AGAIN, AGAIN and AGAIN plugged into the port they suggest. I'm really hacked off with it all. This is the most expensive drive I've ever bought and it's the worst experience I've ever had. I am totally convinced though that this is an iMac 2011 problem. I'm now on my 2nd drive and when it's been plugged into my MacBook Pro it has NEVER ejected. Plugged into my iMac, it's useless and will eject whenever it likes. I will say however, it does appear to be iTunes I'm in all the time when it ejects.

Aug 6, 2011 12:30 AM in response to Infotech 24 7

Do you use Mac Os X Lion allready? Our R6 is working perfect on our iMac, i can open everything. iTunus, Apertures everyting and the R6 still works no failure connection any more!

But what you say is true i think, it's your iMac who causes this trouble. But were to look??


p.s. do you turn off your R4 when you shuting down?? Wo DON'T!!! The R6 is on for 24/7 it never go's offline, the power stay's on!

Aug 6, 2011 12:39 AM in response to Infotech 24 7

The don't suggest that, but your drives will stay longer intact (or how do you say that in english). Think about the big company's were the have big servers for the people online, those machines are on 24/7 for yearssssss.

De drives in your R4 are special build for long lasting pleasure. And the told us the best performance you can get is to alway's leave your Raid machines on power.

When you turn on your R4 does your lights still blinking, because the R4 isn't done with the background actions. That's way the best thing is to leave it on, so the Promise Utility can do his background actions. The machine has an intern background tasking level, so when you turn your machine off it wound be able to do his actions.

I say, just leave the machine on and try that for a couple of day's.

Aug 8, 2011 5:22 PM in response to levindenboer1975

May I ask how you have your RAID set up? Is it primarily for backups and file storage or are you also using it for applications? I'm contemplating one myself along with am new mac mini to replace my aging iMac and three external drives. I am a semi-pro photographer and my wife is a graphic designer. Plus, we have hundreds of movies and thousands of songs we stream to two apple tv's and multiple sound systems. If you're using the drive for file storage how are you backing up your system and files? Using a separate drive, same drive, partition...or relying on RAID 5 redundancy. Any information would be both helpful and appreciated.

Aug 9, 2011 1:08 AM in response to rmichael777

I use mine as my main Aperture, Final Cut X and iTunes drive (in RAID 5). I specifically bought it for this reason due to the speed and size of it. I then have an old Hive RAID 5 4Tb (firewire 800) that I use as my Aperture Vault but then you could use any drive really for the vault. It's not advisable to rely on even a RAID 5 drive as your only drive because although it's pretty safe against failure, it's no safer against any potential file corruption.


I keep my iTunes backed up from the Pegasus onto my TimeCapsule as I double that up as my NAS drive for my Sonos and my original AVCHD files that I use in Final Cut X are all archived safely to Blu Ray discs. This I find works best for me and touch wood I've never lost anything.


The great thing about the R4/R6 is that it's incredibly fast (even faster than my SSD in the iMac) so means Aperture in particular flies along with no lag anywhere.


Fingers crossed, since I left it on it hasn't ejected again but Pegasus have confirmed to me that they believe there may be an iMac firmware update required and they are in talks with Apple regarding this. I do believe the drive is fine, I'm just a little nervous when connected to an iMac at the moment.

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Thunderbolt Pegasus R4 Experience?

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