Q: Thunderbolt Pegasus R4 Experience?

On line support at Promise - yeah terrible - do you have the emails of those three guys? My R6 is read only right now and Promise support and utility say the drive is fine. But it will not veryify and repair - can't use the data on there - just see it. Thanks.

Hi everybody,

I have an R4 8TB running on a brand new iMac w/ Mavericks. I found this forum after ordering the drive and before receiving it. Happy to say I've had a flawless experience with it...so far.

When I run Disk Utility's Verify Disk on my Pegasus R4, it's giving me the following error, saying I need to repair the disk:

Volume bitmap needs minor repair for orphaned blocks

If I try to repair it, I get this error:

Error: Live file system repair is not supported.

Understandably, I'm super nervous about doing anything unnecessary to this drive...firmware updates, disk repairs... While I've had a good experience so far, I'm super nervous, and don't want to lose data. I assume I have to unmount the drive to repair it. Does anybody have any ideas if this repair will be safe or not? Whole point of buying this drive is that I don't easily have another place to stash 6TB of content...

Similar issue. I am still waiting to hear from Pegusus - the first person could not resolve this. Pegusus utility says the drive is fine but Disk Utility insists it needs to be reformatted - cannot be repaired. Since the mac OS historically has had issues with this drive - unmounting it willy nilly -  I am thinking this is not a drive issues but a Mac issue.

I have updated the firmware with Pegasus R6.  I have not updated to Maverick yet..... afraid of all the issues with the R6 and Maverick.

I have backed up everything to assorted old hard drives and the data is also backed up to CrashPlan - but still do not think this is a R6 issue.

If anyone can help that would be apreciated.

update - I reformated the drive..... I am in the process of putting all the data back on it.   I guess I need to run disk utility more often. It seems to be working but it will be another 20 hrs before I get everything back on there. Glad I have CrashPlan.

It seems Disk Utility and the R6 "don't understand each other" very well. There is a thread on MacOS X disk utility not being able to expand a partition on an R6 expanded logical volume. I wouldn't be surprised if the problems [RackZoZing] describes are of a similar nature. Hope Apple looks into this thoroughly, as Pegasus units are one of the few (Apple sold!) reasonably affordable, serioulsy sized and speedy solutions.

Turns out my problem was pretty simple...I unmounted the drive and Disk Repair fixed it immediately. I'm just super nervous and stand-off-ish about this thing based on everyone else's comments. But I guess I'm back to having no problems w/ the drive, knock on wood.

Please sign up for an account at http://support.promise.com. You'll need to register your Pegasus (the serial number is on the back, and the TLA number is on the bottom), then open a new web support request. The web support requests start with the year (2014) and end with S. Give us a call at 408-228-1500, Mon-Fri 8-5, and read us the case number. We'll track the support request and make sure we're all on the same page. Using direct email to bypass this process would lead to some people not having all the information, and for that reason we keep everything online under your account at http://support.promise.com.

Joe Engledow

Technical Support

Promise Technology

Sorry if this is a dumb question but may I ask if the folks having issues with Disk Utils are running it from the Pegasus or from the Mac internal drive?

The reason I ask is thatin the past  I've had OSx install issues on the pegasus that seemed to be resolved when I ran the install from my intrnal drive and installed it on the Pegasus as a target.

Hey Bosto....can I get those guys emails...we have had a pegassis file system destroyed after a power outage that brought down the mac clients but not the server. Plus after a zero of data and CCC clone back to Pegassis, we are again getting I/O errors from CCC when using the Pegassis in backup role. So, I am unplugging the Pegassis and am planning to completely rebuild raid5; put on a mac host running anything except maverick.

I would be most interested to make sure we have latest firmware upgrade though for Pegassis. Right now I plugged in a GTech 4TB drive to serve as a backup to our 'backup server' (usb3 LACIE). Very lucky I had good backups up till Pegassis took a dive.

dmcnerey, were your server and the Pegasus on (the same) UPS when the clients went down? And were _all_ files corrupt, not only the ones open at the time of the power outage? That would be really worrysome.

Years after I first subscribed to this thread, it appears this device is still a problem. 

In the interest of getting to a constructive solution - what are some suitable (and stable) alternatives to the thunderbolt Pegasus?

Hello eljonco.

Each computer has its own battery backup. This WAS NOT my setup and I have no idea if the battery backups are sufficient…since all macs went down…NOT.

I started getting reports that some files that designers were working on were corrupted and links vanished.

I rebooted the server.

After reboot no one could access the Pegassis. When I went on remotely, Pegassis was not mounted (boy, have I seen this even when we first set it up..had to use ONYX to mount 'invisible' drives).  I could not mount pegassis shared files at all with any utility. I ended up rebooting the whole computer again, hoping Pegassis would mount. It never did. In fact Mac reported that a device was bad (not exact error message of couse) and wanted to 'reformat'. Troubles started after that.

To get the artists back up and working, I immediately shared out the Lacie Raid backup device (usb3 on same mac host).

IT reformatted the Pegassis for me (zero'd the data) and put it back in use as our 'backup' to make sure it was stable. CCC was backup up fine for a week. Then 2 days ago, an error re. Pegassis and damaged file system appeared. Disk utility allowed me to repair the raid partition but not the file stucture. Getting very very nervous since we now had NO backup and bad opinions of Raid/thunderbolt, today I put in place a 4TB GTech (no raid) and plan to use it temporarily as my backup.

I don't know what corrupted the pegassis file system…it did start with an abrupt loss of power from mac clients. I saw NOTHING in the console on the mac host server, that it went down at all during the power outage. It stayed up.

I am not tech savvy but after my R6 unmounting at odd times and then the pegassus file systm getting corrupted twice in one month requiring reformatting the whole drive, I sent it back to Apple for a full refund (I have had it a year). I just don't have the time to be continually trouble shooting the drive. I am currently using LaCie thunderbolt 4 Tb RAID with no concerns - but it has only been a month. It is almost full so I will likely order a second one and daisy chain them. I do back up everything to CrashPlan as well. The LasCie is much less expensive but I am finding it a tad slower. Kind of happy to be done with Pegasis.

By the way. This is a brand new Pegasus device with brand new mac mini running mavericks. I have installed, maintained and adminstered mac servers for 13 years prior to this job..xervers, unix, windows servers and all had raids. I have never seen anything like this before and from the chatter this really points to APPLE. I am disappointed that they are not jumping in here and offering hope to a set which THEY recommend and sell on thier store. This is very UNAPPLE like. It seems likely that they have problems with the RAID/Thunderbolt/mavericks setup. So come on apple...where is the patch?

I can't tell you how many calls to Apple Care and trips into the Apple repair guy only to be told my computer was fine with all diognostics. Apple Care people hadn't even heard of the Pegasus Drive. Too many hours with the Pegasus people wiriting emails/phone calls only to tell me nothing wrong withthe drive.

But when I finally asked Apple for a refund they didn't hesitate. I would reconsider the R6 if Appple comes up with a fix. It is fast.