Thunderbolt with Pegasus R4 heavily slows down boot performance of internal SSD

I agree, way out of my price range as well. lol I don't watch my TV but I love HOUSE and the one show they did with only 5Dmkii and 7D's...it was pretty cool. Right now I have 2 5Dmkii and a 7D and will most probably add 2 1DX or 1 1DX and 1 5D mkiii if that ever gets released. lol

Yeah, I'm a big fan of Blu-ray. I watch movie blu-ray movies during the winter and I wish I could dump the DirecTV but the wife has her cooking shows she has to watch. lol The kids stick to Netflix a lot. Actual TV for me is HOUSE and Ice Road Truckers. Maybe some football here and there but that's it. I think once they improve the internet speeds across the nation DirecTV and Dish will be a thing of the past. lol 3 Favorite movies consist of Batman: The Dark Knight, 300 and LOTR. There really is way to many to list but the Joker in Batman: The Dark Knight is the best for me. lol

I have satellite internet... $89 for 5MB down 756kbps up...sad I know. lol When I move, first thing on the list will be "whats the internet speed?" lol

I can't watch 3D movies...I get a headache then get sick. lol I looked hard into the projectors but with the price of the 50" Plasma I got, I couldn't turn it down. I ended up getting 2, one for me and one for the studio. lol I am hoping for 2 things from apple...Blu-ray burner and Adobe flash on the iPhone 5 and iPad 3. lol Scratch that...I have 3...add, a simple way to rename 500 images. lol

lol...that's funny. I will have to remember that World Wide Waiting. 🙂

"slams fist down on the table" just give me flash on my phone. lol I do have to wonder now that Jobs has passed away if Apple adopts flash for the iPhone? I won't hold my breath. lol

I have looked into external Blu-ray burners but they are at the bottom of the list. I'm actually looking into offering my images on a USB device including a video file for the slideshow. I hate burning disks. lol I've only done about 10 today but 10 is enough. lol

Mrvoeg,

Sorry to disappoint you but I cancelled the order for the laCie and ordered another Pegasus R4. I couldn't wait for the laCie and the R4 is blazing fast at a solid 450mbps write and read. I will install Lion on my R4 Saturday morning and give you some updates as to my boot times and performance of apps including FCPX.

Steven

Mrvoeg,

Well, Lion on the R4 is awesome! Boot times seem a little faster although not by a large amount. I didn't do any time tests due to my iMac is always on so boot times don't mean much to me, either way it's not slower on booting up.

As for Performance...it rocks. I'm getting a solid 450MBps Write and Read with write getting over 540MBps at times. Read Maxing out at around 470MBps. As for Apps...they run a whole lot faster. Some things I'm not seeing huge gains but that might just be the apps and how they run. The apps do seem to load faster and just run smoother. Copying a 6GB file in under a minute is awesome. Scrolling through 25MB Raw files with no wait time is unreal... I'm completely happy with it! FCPX runs great as well. Smoother and faster...well worth the extra $$$ imo.

Hey guys,

This has been a great thread so far, but still have some questions. My current setup is 2 G5 Xserves and XserveRAID box that is about 5 years old. Backup is done nightly with Retrospect to an external removal bare drive using a wiebtech hot swap drive dock that is rotated off site. The system provides file, mail, web, etc services provide to a small design team of about 5 users. This includes 1.5TB with the major of being photos (in iPhoto) and drawing files (in AutoCAD). I have recently ordered 2 Mac Mini Servers w/Thunderbolt and I am considering the Pegasus (2 R4s or 1 R6) to replace the XserveRAID.

First, has anyone successfully rack mounted these units? Second, since I have 1000mb switched network, I assume I will be limited to 100Mbs

Thanks,

David

David,

Yeah, the network is the part that *****. I'm pulling a solid 450MBps write and read on the Pegasus R4 (4TB in Raid 0) and 2 of my iMacs can copy files from the 1 iMac with Pegasus R4 connect at up to 120MBps speeds across a wired network using a Airport Extreme. Bottom line, 120MBps across a wired network is still faster than USB or Firewire but nowhere near the 450MBps that the 1 iMac enjoys. Since you will have the Pegasus R4 or R6 plugged into Mac Mini servers you won't see any speeds higher than 120MBps. I'm able to enjoy the 450MBps write and read on 1 iMac because my R4 is plugged directly into 1 iMac and 2 other iMacs feed information from 1 iMac with the R4. I do not use the R4 for backup though...my main data is on the R4 and all 3 iMac's edit from the R4 unit. With 3 people editing images on the R4 my speeds do drop down some as low as 60MBps but I would say it's a good 90MBps most of the time which is still faster than firewire 800.

I do actually have Lion on my R4 unit so I am not using my internal HD. I have 3 Backups to the R4 unit, 1 via Time Machine(FW800 HD) which backs up on the hour and 2 via Carbon Copy Cloner(USB drives) that are in the morning(1am and 2am). I also have 2 other Backups off site, one has original files and the other is swapped out every month. I do have other backups but you get the idea...backup, backup and more backups are good.

Oh, I only have my R4 units on a desk and so i'm not sure about rack mounting them. Might be able to get away with Stacking them although they are very nice looking imo and sitting on a shelf is not an eye sore at all imo. I do use 2 R4 units. One as the Main for everyone and one that is on my iMac, I use FCPX and wanted to enjoy the 450MBps speeds so my R4 is only for FCPX only although Lion is installed and I don't use the internal HD. I think the Mini is good but with limited network speeds, I think it's kinda pointless. Might as well let 1 Mac enjoy the fast speeds of the R4 and the other 4 in your case have the 100MBps speeds. For someone who isn't interested in getting a new Mac, the mac mini is a cheap solution so you just got to work out what's best for you.

I haven't had any problems with my 2 R4 Units.

Hi Steven,

Just to add my 10 cents and let the thread know that booting Lion from my R4 (1A) over Thunderbolt is still worrking like a charm!.. no problems at all. Similar to you, I have 2 x WD 2TB USB drives as a TM and a Deja Vu backup. The only issue that I've had actually happened last night when my TM external backup somehow got corrupted and now thinks that it's full? Looks like it thinks it has an 800M + partition that even an erase won't get rid of??? so I'm zero'ing the drive tonight ot see if it makes any difference! any suggestions are welcome!

Pegasus has been brilliant!

Cheers,

Steve

Steve,

I might be wrong and anyone free feel to correct me but on your TM HD showing 800MB....you know, how you can delete everything on a HD and use recovery software to retreive some of that data back after deleting it? That's most probably where the 800MB's is showing up... What happens is you have a HD, fill it up, then delete it and write data to it again and Normally it's only a few GB's here or there so as you write data back to the empty drive it will write over that 800MB's and because you are normally copying only a few GB's here or there, you never get a "disk is full" except when you use TM. TM sees you are wanting to save 1.5TB of data on a 2TB HD that has 800MB data(which is deleted but it the back ground) and will give you a "Disk is Full" so what I've done in the past is exclude a few folders and TM only like 1TB of data(1TB + 800MB is under 2TB) when it's done copying, you will see you will have 1TB full, not the 1.8TB..it's because you delete the data, which gets deleted but still there and as you copy more files, it will write over that 800MB that is deleted but still there... make sense? lol I am pretty sure, that is how it works. Might not be totally correct and I might be missing some Tech terms but if you exclude a few folders so the first TM backup is under 2TB(with the 800MB background data inculded) you will be able to remove the excluded folders after the first backup so you can fit everything on.

Now, was your TM actually corrupt or just full? How much data are you backing up total from your R4? As you Backup data, TM keeps older backups so you might want to check to see how long you keep your older back ups....I have mine on a week. Look under Options in TM.

steven,

thanks for the insight. i ended up ordering an (1) R4 to test for my setup from B&HPhoto last week shortly after you response. i plan to start setting eveything up later today physically. the reliability is very important and concerned me with the other thread of issues. it seems most of those problem users are euro located so their may be something to the gsm/spectrum hypothesis.

i already have a XrackPro 12U rack with noise reduction from my previous setup and would like to use it. i ordererd a 1U sonnet rack system for mounting the 2 mini servers and will likely just place the R4 on a rack shelf below them. my only decision at this point is what to RAID level to format the R4. no need to use 0 due to my network so i am looking at 5 and 1E (due to the article you referenced) to get some redundancy. the performance is better with 1E, but in either case the network will be my limitation. with 1E it seems i could potentially lose 2 drives and still be operable... as long as the second one lost is not in the mirror of the first? with 5, i could only lose 1 disk and be operable, but i would have an additional 1G of storage (i.e. 3 instead of 2 of 1E). raid 5 rebuild can be rather slow and bring performance down ~25%. any thoughts on 1E?

one other thing i forgot to mention is that we are looking at upgrading all iPhoto users to Aperture with the masters referenced off the RAID once everything is tested. any experience with that?