Promise Pegasus2 R6 with 6TB Drives??

Hi Charlie

I have the same question. I was wondering have you got any feedback on this issue. I have a Pegasus 2 R4. I also have the recommended Seagate 4TB drives but need more space. I'm considering 6TB reds from WD. I would like to wait another couple of months to see if the new WD 8TB red drives could also work in the R4 when they become available.

Robert

iMac 27(late 2012), El Capitan 10.11.2

I had a look on the Promise website and the only information I could find suggests that the only officially supported 6TB drive is the Toshiba MD04ACA600.

I can add a general comment. Most if not all RAID system suppliers including NAS systems have compatibility lists. These lists cover those make and model of drives that they have specifically tested and often might even list specific firmware releases of those drives. Not being on the list does not necessarily mean the drive will not work, it merely means they have not tested them and therefore do not officially support them. It could be that they will work perfectly it could be that they (Promise) might need to add specific settings to their RAID system e.g. the Pegasus2 to tune their product for them, or to make them fully compatible.

Clearly security and reliability of data is important to nearly everyone and therefore many people would err on the side of caution.

I would say most of the time you can get away with using unlisted i.e. untested drives but it will be at your own risk. If you ensure you have backups which of course you should have regardless then you should be covered.

For what its worth you can now get 10TB drives from HGST. These also have not been tested by Promise.

Hi John

Thank you so much for your help. I did check the Promise web before posting to this site but could only find the older "promise Pegasus R4/R6 Service Release compatibility list V1.9 dated 10/24/13". I used this list last time I added the 4 TB Seagate ST4000DM000 drives to my R4 2 and also my older R6 1. These have worked fine.

Where did you find the mention of the 6TB Toshiba MD044ACA600 and the 10TB drives from HGST, assume the He10, being accepted by Promise. At an estimated $800US these are expensive. They obviously have not tested the He8 or He6 which are less expensive per TB. I was waiting for WD to bring out their non shingled drives, as the HGST from WD are a little more in price per TB, to try on this unit.

I recently had a new Seagate Shingled Archive external 8TB drive fail after two uses, I had black ups of coarse but it takes so long to restore that much data.

Robert

With regards to the HGST 10TB drives I was merely pointing out that 6TB is no longer the biggest you can get.

Here is the article showing the Toshiba 6TB being certified. It is the version 2.9 compatibility list as listed on the Promise download page.

http://www.promise.com/Download.aspx?DownloadFileUID=3978

Hi John

Thanks for the updated list much appreciated missed it. Mine list is the older R4 and R6 list which has not been updated since 2013.

Robert

In answer to your original question, Charlie, I recently bought two 5-TB Toshiba internal drives. They were about $150 each on sale. The 6-TB equivalent drives were also on sale, but around $200 each, more than I wanted to spend at that time. The 5-TB drives were not on Promise's compatibility list and I don't believe the 6's were either, although someone mentioned above that there is a 6-TB Toshiba listed as compatible by Promise.

I initially installed the two 5-TB drives in a RAID configuration, thinking that increasing my storage from 6 total TB to 10 total TB, I could afford to lose half of the 10 to get a RAID backup of 5-TB in the two new drives. I immediately began having freezes of the entire Pegasus2 enclosure. I could not access any of the drives and the Promise Utility would not even open the main window when it launched. I had updated the firmware and the software.

I thought that the drives were incompatible with the Pegasus2 and I would have to find a different way to use them. But I decided to try using them as Pass Thru volumes and using ChronoSync to synchronize folders on the two drives for file duplication, instead of the RAID system. Since I made that change, I have had no problems with the Promise enclosure and I have gone from 14 TB of external storage to 18. And I still have two 3-TB internal drives I can use to replace smaller drives in other enclosures and attach to my Time Capsule.

For $300 I felt it was worth the money to test the drives in the Pegasus. If it didn't work, I could get other enclosures and connect them in some less convenient way. Since my experience, I would not be very concerned about testing an unlisted drive, with the understanding, as mentioned above, that it is solely at my risk.

I agree. Promise are very slow in updating their compatibility list so you have to go it alone. It appear you are mixing different drives in your R6. This is a no no according to Promise. Last year I changed all my 2TB drives in my R6 to Seagate 4TB and operate it on RAID5 and all is well. Last week I replaced all the 2TB drives in my R4 with with WD Reds 6TB. Using RAID5 the write speed is fine at 500MB/s but the read speed is only 150MB/s which is too slow. So may be that is why they are not on compatibility list. It works fine just slow at reading. Cache of REDS is 64 same as old drives. Stripe size set at 128KB as files are mainly video files in FCPX. Sector size is set at 512 Bytes. If any one wants a tip on buying WD REDs at the moment just ask. Using latest firmware also.

Robert

robert,

I guess I don't follow the rules very well some times. I find that replacing the drives in pairs is more economical and works fine.

The only place I read of a downside to having different sized drives was in a RAID config. It would use the drives, but you lose the extra space on the larger drives. Since it included that comment in the literature, I figured the equipment wouldn't melt if I did it.

I'm sure having them all identical is probably better, but it's just too normal.

I also have a Pegasus2 R4 loaded up with four 4TB Seagate Drives. Three days ago I purchased from Amazon four Toshiba X300 6TB drives (model HDWE160), the 2016 replacement drives for the recommended Toshiba MD04ACA600 drives mentioned earlier. I then swapped out the 4TB drives with the 6TB drives. The substitution worked flawlessly. Using the Promise Utility, the Pegasus2 R4 recognized all the drives, formatted them and created a Raid 5 logical drive, then synchronized the drive in the background. It reported no errors when done. I transferred back in the meantime about 10 TB of data during the long synchronization that took over 1 1/2 days to complete without any problems.

So far it seems that the new Toshiba X300 6TB drives work well with the Pegasus2 R4 raid..

Have you ran a disk benchmark to make sure the read/write speed is where it should be? I'm thinking about grabbing 8 of these for an R8, but want to be sure they'll work. 🙂