Thunderbolt Pegasus R4 Experience?

(I haven't read this whole thread, but...)

I don't recommend putting the system on the Promise Pegasus Raid. We noticed LOTS of instability on our systems with Lion Server. When we changed the system to internal disks in the Minis and just run storage on the Pegasus, everything is working fine.

My primary boot partition is on an internal SSD as is the home directory, so it's not related to where my boot partition is. The problem only started when I upgraded the R4 firmware.

My best success so far has been to (1) power up the R4 and let it sit for 2 minutes and then (2) power up my MBP, and let it sit a moment, then login. Usually, boots up with no issue. If I do it differently, i've a 50/50 chance my setup doesn't start up correctly.

Incidentally, I have no problems booting the MBP when it's not connected to the R4 RAID.

There doesn't seem to be fix for this until Promise updates the utility to provide more configuration options but I was hoping to find a workaround, which doesn't exist either.

i'll just have to wait on Promise.

My is a DOA, more than one week to start shipping (not yet shipped today replacement unit).

This guys test something or just assemble some stuff and ship to customers?

I cannot accept a doa on a 1000€ and over device.....(no damage at box delivery from Apple Store)

First and last time I bought something from Promise.....

They should learn from WD support.

And here I thought we were out of the woods...

I posted in this thread in the early days with my drive constantly disconnecting. We had to deal with Promise support and dealt with a great deal of back and forths and partial solutions (including them using remote access software to access the machine to try and fix the darn thing). Long story short things seemed to have been fixed for a while.

We still get the ocassional drop-out, usually during large file transfers but that's about it.

Then a few weeks back one of the drives turned red. We were concerned... then the RAID wouldn't mount. Disk Utility didn't see it but the Promise software DID and it said it was a temperature issue. We left the drive off for a few hours turned it back on and things were just peachy - it booted, the red light was no longer present it seemed all was good.

Until last night. During a very large file transfer the drive disconnected. Theoretically no big deal. The problem is that it seems that it has corrupted the folder I was transfering too (we were migrating video content from another system into this folder which already had a couple hundred gigs of files already). Finder is now reporting the folder to only be a few gigabytes large. On top of that Mac OS X is giving an error message saying it's unable to repair the disk "Promise Pegasus" and to backup and replace as soon as possible. The promise utility? It says everything is just fine, other than a temperature warning.

I'm at my wits end with this thing. Just when you think its fine it throws another curve ball at you. Surprisingly we have a second unit that seemingly works just fine. Perhaps it's this early days model that is screwed up, who knows. All I know is I'm tired of trying to deal with it.

Hey, just wanted to give you one more piece of info regarding the Promise Pegasus R4.... I was freaked out when I connected my new RAID and saw that the system time was July 23rd 2010. Time was OK. I opened a support case with Promise, and they asked me to send in stuff. So I did, and later, when thinking things through again at work, I wondered whether the system time on the computer (a mini) the R4 is connected to might have a say in that.

Bingo: My system time was wrong, the NTP server switched off for some reason. So I corrected that, restarted the R4, and voila.... everything is fine. So, before freaking out and finding that you can not change the system time of the RAID with the CLI, just check the time of the server it's connected to. Might be the reason.

ehmjay, I feel like your twin at the moment. I, like everyone had the same problemes late last year. Then with the firmware updates things got a lot better. But big transfers or very long renders would occasionally send my R6 offline... Very frustrating. But since last week things have gone radicaly downhill. Trying to render a simple quicktime put the thing down to it's knees. I too got the same error message, saying that I had to back everything up as soon as possible, that i could no longer write on the disk - just read and to reformat as soon as possible. I did do this, but the drive is acting very flacky, and this is the second time this drive has caused serious problemes. I feel like I can no longer trust this drive for serious work, it keeps letting me down.

Funny thing is I see that there is a brand new firmware update at : http://www.promise.com/support/download_view.aspx?rsn=1363&m=93®ion=en-global

Pegasus R6 firmware update 5.02.0000.70 2013/02/22

discription : Major bug fix: Solve the system I/O hung issue.

So I'm like, ok ! This might be a way out of the big 'ol mess. Only I get an error message when I try to install the firmware, and oddly, the Promise software says that all soft and firmware updates are up to date - so it obviously isn't "aware" of the new firmware "5.02.0000.70". The bios of my R6 currently is "5.02.0000.69"

What !!! The major bug fix doesn't even work ! I want to throw this bloody thing out a window for all the headaches it has caused. And such a shame because it was very promising. When it works it works very well. But when it doesn't it doesn't work at all - and having to put up with this tempormental disk is wearing my patience out. I can't trust this thing for work !

I hear that Lacie released thier "5big" series that looks to compete with Promise/drobo - only it's raid 0 and doesn't do raid5. ****, if a raid 0 lacie just works, than I'll take it any day over a raid5 promise that doesn't. Anyone hear about these things ?

I'm currently working off of my clients own 2To Western Digial FW800 drive... It's much slower than my promise. But it doesn't hang or go offline during transfers and renders ! Grrrrr........

Just a question: Did you guys check whether there are any cellphones nearby? I had exactly one d/c: When I put my cell on top of the drive, and I remember reading someone's comment that the TB interface is very susceptible to interference by cellphones....

Hi to everyone that own this rock stable, fantastic and bug-free unit 😟!!!!

some days ago unplugging a usb cable touched the thunderbolt cable and the unit disconnected,

the cable was firmly and totally inserted in tb port!!! this disappointed me, restarted Imac and was OK.

My Imac late2012 got a firmware update to version 1.2 of thunderbolt, so check yours.

does not know what it do but I think is a good idea to install it.

my R4 unit havea previous version of the following firmware, checking with utility does not report anything new but

I have seen some formware on devices that aren't available for public download.

(I have changed 3 units and I can say this for sure)

Someone is able to install the latest firmware? how?

I'll Up on this !

We've juste received a new 27 imac and it already has 1.2 thunderbolt firmware. The big problem is that now, the Imac sees almost all files on the pegasus as corrupted files. If I connect the pegasus to my MBP (early 2011 with thunderbolt 1.2) , this one sees the files just fine. The microcontroller on the Imac and the MBP seems different (22.1 - 2.1.3 for my MBP and 23.4 - 0.12.3 for the new Imac). For now, anymay, the Pegasus is unusable. Hope I'll find a solution soon

Yes, but as the Pegasus works perfectly with the MBP, I'm not confortable messing around with utility repair and potentially loose everything on the disks. I feel that it's a microcontroler change in apple's hardware that causes the problem. I'm desesperatly trying to contact promise support.. to be continued...

Friday night the R6 remote backup on a mini i5 (10.7.5) suddenly lost it after months of faithful 24/7 service. Not visible in finder. All lights on. Would not switch off using the on/off button, the Promise Utility did not see the unit, Disk Util did not see the unit. Pulled the power plug and rebooted, no avail. Utility updated, then said I was up to date. No unit. Googled. Found this thread.

Called Eindhoven on monday. Within minutes I got through, a very knowledgeable help desk employee told me to push out the drives while the chassis was still off, boot the thing and run firmware update. It found Firmware 5.02.00000.70. Installed, shut down (via subsystem information menu!), pushed in the drives and rebooted the system. Up and running like a charm. Drive mounted immediately. All the data was there. Did the 'telephone test' (I'm in EU), no problems.

Kudos for the help desk.

Thank you, eljonco, for taking the time to document your situation with a positive outcome. Many times, when a solution is found, folks forget about letting us know what finally worked for them. I had not heard about pushing drives out while off, rebooting, running firmware update, push drives back in, and reboot. This is good for all of us to know about in the future, I'm sure. 😀

I did not mention that I could not see the unit in Promise Utility while the disks were plugged in and that at that moment the Utility said there was no update available. After shutdown (the hard way, no other option), disks ejection and boot-up, the Promise Utility DID see the unit and also reported an available firmware update. I guess if the Utility does not see a unit, it looks for its own application version, while when it sees a unit, it checks for the unit's firmware version. This has been mentioned (admittedly, between the lines) before. A bit confusing, but now sorted out.

Hey KGCW, did you get any response from Promise support regarding your issue with the corrupted files? I have exactly the same problem: I have a R6 plugged into a brand new iMac 27 - and most if not all of the movie clips (.mov) that I transferred from an external disk onto the R6 are corrupt (sound hissing, no image, etc.). I haven't tried to access the R6 from a different Mac but I'll try. But in the end: What good is an R6 if I can't use it on top-notch Apple hardware?

In follow up to my previous (now solved) problems, soon I found the R6 had stopped working again. Knowing my ways out of the woods now, I called Promise EU suppport. They asked me to do a subsystem diagnostic run with and without the drives in and upload the diagnostic files to the ticket system. Drive #6 was diagnosed bad. The following morning, replacement drive was delivered. After swapping the drive, to my dismay, according to the utility the new drive was "dead". Fortunately, after another call to support who told me to unmount and reboot the unit, I was able to assign disk #6 to the RAID 5, reboot and rebuild, and we were up and redundant again within 24 hours from the start of the failure. Another thumbs up for the EU support team.