Thunderbolt Pegasus R4 Experience?

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

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 🙂

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?

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.

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.

Thank's for the info infotech.

We shall send the message also to the company here in the netherlands. I'll keep you up to date. Weird isn't!!! That the big rack suddenly just pop's out of your desktop! Very weird... sorry for my english writing, i'll hope you understand me.

Greetings Levin den Boer.

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...

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!

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!

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.

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.

I basically rely on Raid 5 redundancy but always have a spare drive sealed onhand if anything goes bad. If you purchase an R6 model with 6 drives, you have the option of Raid 6 where up to two drives can fail. However I still use Raid 5 on the R6 with spare drives. Back up on cloud or dropbox for your most critical files.