Thunderbolt Pegasus R4 Experience?

Tidbits, Mine is running steady at 1100rpm, and I must say, I have my R6 sitting out in the open about 3 feet from my ears and I can hardly discern ANY fan noise at all. I am most impressed with the near-silence of this unit, having worked around racks of drives all my life. To me, the unit is amazing since I did the firmware upgrade correctly. Hope this helps...

Yes, it helps me decide I will just exchange the unit for a new one while I still can. Since I plan on having this out in the open as well I need a more quiet unit.

The decision to leave it out in the open was actually a forced one because when I had it on the shelf in a hutch unit above my iMac 27", the enclosure of the hutch shelf back and sides and shelf above it was enough to make it run borderline hot temp all the time. Then, add in the heat that came from the top vents of the iMac right up toward the R6, it was suffering overtemps on a regular basis. When I moved it down to the desktop open area to the side of the iMac, it now runs 114 degrees rather than 122 degrees (backplane temp.) BIG difference! And because it is so quiet, I don't even notice it is on... truly.

This will sound too simple...

But I have found that by using "Get Info" ( Command I ) on the external drive and then scroll to the bottom of the window to find the "Ignore ownership on this volume" box. To the right should be a little ICON of a padlock. You need to click on that and enter your Mac password to unlock and get access to the little Ignore Ownership box. Once you have access to it Deselect it so that there is no check mark in the box. Click on the lock icon to relock the box and then you can close the window. I would suggest that you then reboot your Mac. This simple process on external drives is usually critical befor using backup programs like Chronosync etc. I have used this simple fix dozens of times and in fact I just used this technique on a problematic OtherWorldComputing 12 Terabyte SATA RAID system connected with Thunderbolt to a Thunderbolt 27 inch iMac via a Lacie Thunderbolt eSATA adapter. WHEW! Fantastic speed and it is now running beautifully.

I hope this helps.

Gary

Update: I contacted Promise Technical support. They asked me to run a bunch of commands and send the output to them. They found nothing wrong. So they said to go into System Preferences > Energy Saver and uncheck "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible."

I responded that this doesn't make sense because I have another Thunderbolt drive that never has this problem. If it was a system wide setting, then both drives should have the same problem.

Promise responded only with a link to the Apple website page that explains how to set the Energy Saver settings.

It remains to be seen whether this will work around the problem or not.

Regardless, they've clearly got a problem that other Thunderbolt Drives don't. (My other drive is a WD My Book Thunderbolt Duo.) And they won't acknowledge it. Last time I'll buy anything from them.

Hello, my Promise R4's fans are running constantly at 1100 RPM and they ARE noisy! Sometimes the whole chasis resonates and I need to press some parts to make it silent. But is is not silent as, I can hear it very clearly 2 metres away on the desk. Does it mean my fans are broken and I should return it for replacement? I tried to move it under the table to some small cabinet with perforated doors but I got warnings about the temperature.

Mine run at 1100 RPM all the time as well. Mine are not silent, but they are also not noisy.

I don't have the problem with resonance. Perhaps turn it off, then reseat all the drives? Also, to help keep any vibration from translating to the desktop and amplifying the sound, you might try sitting it on something like a mouse pad for a bit of mechanical isolation.

With so many problems being reported, I guess these things are just not read for prime time.

I have an independent Apple Reseller near to where I live, after 6 months of selling them they have now removed the Promise drives from their stock list; in the words of one of the sales staff, the reputation on which they built the business was being damaged by the hight number of customer issues.

It's very strange. Among so many complaints there is also a large number of us running these devises with no issue at all. Personally I've been running mine as my startup disk since last November with (touch wood) not a single incident. Admittedly if I had known then what I know now, then I may have reconsidered my purchase. I guess I consider myself one of the lucky ones!

Just interested to know if the new thunderbolt update pushed with 10.7 has fixed any of the issues?

So far, my experience has been far less than gratifying. Under deadline, we had a power outage- and another about 20 seconds later. The Pegasus now believes it houses 4 dead drives, which the Promise site swears up and down is easily fixed by going to the terminal and using telnet to access the IP address of the Thunderbolt raid.

Except it doesn't have an IP address.

Their KB says the IP address info is in the manual. I've looked at the one on my desk and the one online- not a peep about IP addresses or telnet. Get info? Can't. Promise Utility? No mention of an IP address.

I tried online support. 9-5:30, M-F, PST. Online support? Nonexistent. My project? Due at 8am tomorrow.

Up until this I've been pretty patient with the Pegasus problems (staticy music playback while reading/writing, a bit of a problem when doing video to put it extremely mildly); temperature errors after updating the software (there is no temperature problem- just a RAID cabinet that's touchy).

I'm a fix-it-yourself guy. Give me good instructions and I won't bug you- but the inability to do anything with the terrible documentation, coupled with a *very* touchy RAID case, and the stress of explaining to my client why he has to go to HIS boss empty-handed in the morning has me regretting ever making this purchase.

So to answer the OP- The performance is breathtakingly stellar, but the tech support/ knowledgebase issues alone ensure that I'll never buy another Promise product, sadly.

Ironic name for this company because the only thing they 'promise' is to obfuscate and hope thier customers just go away. The unit arrived in what I thought was working order until initial set up was on 24+ hours... I called Apple who was great but suspected the drive, not my new MBP Retina...So they gave me Promise's number and I had an hour long call with "Joe" (US person). He said it was faulty drive but before they could exchange had to send my system file.... 2 exchanges later with an Indian person- they said 'they see no prob, can I explain what the prob was"... HUH!?? You are kidding right? I am still waiting on my third response after FIVE days..NOTHING. GREAT NEWS was that Apple took the drive back no questions asked. THANK YOU APPLE. Buyer beware!!

fyi, I posted this TWICE on apple.com review and they have NOT published it! That is even more disstressing than this drive/company!!

To all running or thinking about buying a promise R6/R4 --

I have been keeping a close eye on this thread in case my system went down....

So far I have had great success.

My set-up is as follows.

Mac Mini 2 Ghz i7 16gb ram, thunderbolt running 10.7.4 Server -

Three R6 daisy-chained usung apple thunderbolt cables

Two Seagate 3TB Firewre drives making nightily backups from two of the R6s

No Monitor

UPS hooed up to all units with auto shutoff via USB

Apple Airport WIFI through-out the home

It runs 24/7 and serves 3 people in my home office.

I work in native photoshop files via CAT5e and have never had an eject....

I am in the US and use AT&T for cell phones via iphone...

My producer works right near the server and he has Verizon on a non-smartphone.

Hope this helps...

Joe

TERRIBLE!

I was buying an R4 4tb and a thunderbolt cable from apple on mid july.

Its ok for 10 days, amazing speed, i use them for final cut pro x.

After 10 days i dont see on desktop the promise icon, i call apple care ...

apple care send me new cable, i try et voilà....promise icon on desktop, all ok!!

this morning i dont see promise icon on desktop....PANIC.

i try with tin-alu paper on cable, but nothing to do....

i believe there is a issue with imac, software and thunderbolt cable...

.....

Imac 27 3.4ghz i7, 16gb ram, ati 6970 2gb, 256 hdd ssd + 2tb, Promise Pegasus R4

Just wanted to chime in to say I bought one of these for my iMac late last year and have had practically zero issues. It was hands down my favorite purchase of the year. Well, that and my cat 🙂.

The worst thing that happened was I accidentally kicked the thunderbolt cable and ripped it out of the back of the iMac mid edit (FCPX). I shut down FCPX, plugged the cable back in and reopened - like it never happened.

The only other thing was that for a while I had my home folder on the thunderbolt drive and that caused issues recording when using Logic (a delay of a few seconds before the recording began). I moved everything back. No Trouble.