Promise Pegasus R4 4TB (4x1TB) RAID System

Reviews for Promise Pegasus R4 4TB (4x1TB) RAID System

Customer Reviews and Ratings

3.5 out of 5 stars

Based on 30 reviews

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  • 4.0 out of 5 stars

    It Definitely Has the Speed, But ...

    • Written by from Tetonia

    Drive is installed on a 2011 17" MacBook Pro (8,3) Core I7 2.3 GHz 8 GB.

    IMHO, $50 is a little much for a 6 foot cable that ought to be included with the drive.

    Out of the box, it comes set up for a RAID 5 configuration which gives you 3 TB. Here are QuickBench results with 1.093 TB free:

    Transfer Size Large Read Large Write

    2 MBytes 620.975 MB/Sec 554.112 MB/Sec
    3 MBytes 698.929 MB/Sec 610.119 MB/Sec
    4 MBytes 724.439 MB/Sec 610.904 MB/Sec
    5 MBytes 766.055 MB/Sec 625.012 MB/Sec
    6 MBytes 774.070 MB/Sec 590.093 MB/Sec
    7 MBytes 788.594 MB/Sec 613.141 MB/Sec
    8 MBytes 808.657 MB/Sec 657.099 MB/Sec
    9 MBytes 818.175 MB/Sec 707.836 MB/Sec
    10 MBytes 801.079 MB/Sec 622.765 MB/Sec

    Large Ave 755.664 MB/Sec 621.231 MB/Sec

    ... Which is almost 3 times faster than my 3 Gbs SSD.

    But first you have to wait 10 hours while it sets up the RAID 5 configuration. Backups from my SSD to the Pegasus are lightening fast. However, I've noticed two problems with this drive. The first and most serious is that when I tried to transfer large folders (> 1 TB) to the R4 from a G Raid drive connected via an esata card, the copy would halt after a few hundred GB and my G Raid drive would be trashed. It did this twice in a row. I was finally able to transfer the files by connecting the G Raid with a FW 800 connection. This is probably an Apple rather than a Promise prroblem.

    The second problem is that when using the Pegasus as a boot drive, it's no faster or even slower booting than a regular HDD. My SSD is much faster on boot, but at least you can boot from the Pegasus. I'm going to reconfigure it as a RAID 0 and get 33% more storage than I have now and hopefully a speed increase.

    274 of 309 people found this useful

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  • 4.0 out of 5 stars

    Pegasus RAID R4

    • Written by from Las Vegas

    I use this system with my MacBook Pro 17 in 2.3 GHz.

    As mentioned in another review it takes over 10 hours of setup time after taking it out of the box and is configured for RAID 5. This leaves 3TB of storage. After testing transfer speeds, it averages around 380 MB/s read/write using the AJA system test.

    I have my Apple Cinema Display 30 in monitor via dual link mini-display port attached to the Thunderbolt port on the Pegasus. It does not allow passive transfer via the Thunderbolt port so you must keep the Pegasus on in order to use the external display.

    The OWC 3g SSD inside the MBP boots much faster than the Pegasus, even though data transfer is around 240 MB/s by AJA system test.

    The OS was updated to 10.7 and seems to run fine on the Pegasus system.

    Overall, the system is a little pricey but offers a reliable fast external storage system.

    165 of 187 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Fastest Storage Ever Made!!!

    • Written by from Wheat Ridge

    This is the fastest external storage device ever made available to consumers period! I transferred my entire iTunes library (182 GB) from my MacBook air (2011) to the promise Pegasus R4 model in 14 min which is crazy fast. Though the Pegasus did not heat up during the process thanks to the duel fans and remained quiet. Also promise kept Mac user in mind with a simple set up and a application to manage Pegasus Which is done for you. This application basically runs Ccheck ups on space, temperature, power, etc. With great power comes great cost, though its worth the money if your going to use pegasus to its full potentioal. Promise also announced they would eventually sell precofigured drives for pegasus- which makes upgrading an option down the road. Being a consumer who is using the Promise Pegasus to store my iTunes library and stream movies from it, it works great. I can watch an HD movie from the Pegasus without any lag, even when skipping around. Buyers be aware that it will take 10 hours to automatically set up/configure the pegasus drives. I just sat back and let it do its thing. All in all this is a product that lives up to its name and is lightning fast.

    124 of 136 people found this useful

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  • 2.0 out of 5 stars

    Died 1 month after purchase

    • Written by from Naperville

    The unit was working wonderfully, until about 1 month after I bought it. All 4 drives suddenly came up as "dead," and I cannot get it to recognize any other drives. I've got a call into technical support but such an error seems inexcusable for a $1k RAID!

    That being said, it worked wonderfully before it died. The configuration software was relatively easy to use, too. It is a bit loud, though, and uses almost 60 Watts of power.

    57 of 64 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Thunderboltingly Fast

    • Written by from Flinders Park

    I edit weddings from two high end video cameras and two Nikon D7000 cameras. I also Have several very large Aperture 3 libraries. This raid is the best thing I have ever done to speed up the editing process. If I scroll through my images (not in preview mode) in Aperture, I can't keep up with how fast they are rendered to screen, and Final Cut Pro X absolutely rips through scrubbing. Thunderbolt technologies are a must going forward.

    50 of 52 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Great product

    • Written by from San Juan Capistrano

    I've owned my Pegasus R4 since 12/01/2011
    Why I love it:
    1) Quiet
    2) Fast. Amazingly fast.
    3) Value for the quantity, reliability and speed of the storage.
    4) Good support.

    There was a huge problem with this product losing Thunderbolt connectivity when it first shipped. Boards all over the US and UK lit up reporting the problem. It took a few weeks but Promise was responsive, sent out new firmware and I haven't had a problem since.

    It's sitting 8 inches from my display and has been running 24/7 since Dec 2011. Did I say it is quiet?

    Yes RAID 5 yields 3T from 4T of physical drive space. This is a known fact of any RAID system. You have to give up something to get redundancy.

    42 of 42 people found this useful

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  • 4.0 out of 5 stars

    Good system, Incomplete docs & status reporting

    • Written by from Hyattsville

    This is a good product. I use it as a time machine backup drive on a system with a variety of file sizes. It's reliable, fast, relatively silent, and its LED lights aren't distractingly bright. It ships with a Thunderbolt cable that is reasonably long (but also easy to plug-in backwards.)

    Unfortunately, the documentation and status reporting are inadequate.

    When you first turn the array on, you are informed by a leaflet in the box that you will need to wait up to 10 hours while the unit "initializes and synchronizes" itself for RAID 5. Why? Couldn't they have done this at the factory? The manual suggests that "initialization" is performed to zero-out old data, but why would that be necessary for brand new drives?

    More problematically, if the array loses power, it apparently has an undocumented feature that makes it seize up and go persistently offline once reactivated. This behavior actually makes sense, because the outage *might* have corrupted data, and you should verify that everything's OK before you resume use. However, discovering all your drives incorrectly reported "dead" one afternoon by the indicator lights and bundled utility software is unsettling.

    After this happened to my system, customer support diagnosed the problem and helped to resolve it promptly. (Amusingly, when this review was written in December 2011, their email address was "ts".) The solution involved the use of a dedicated Terminal utility that was not mentioned in the product manual.

    These are probably just growing pains for a newly consumer-oriented product category that was previously aimed only at infrastructure professionals and harnessed to "uninterruptible" power supplies. But products in the Apple ecosystem should be held to a higher standard, and this one loses a star for now.

    45 of 48 people found this useful

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  • 4.0 out of 5 stars

    Fast Storage, Good Control Interface

    • Written by from Highlands Ranch

    The Pegasus comes with the Promise Utility to manage it. You have the option of letting it configure itself out of the box (yes, as others have mentioned, this does take 8 to 10 hours) or you can set it up in custom configurations.

    I have mine set up as a RAID0 for the fastest write times. The bonus of this is that there is no waiting to initialize. I chose the drives, made the array, and was off and running. I do have other backup in place, so I'm not relying on the RAID5 to save me in the case of drive failure.

    For large chunks of data, this is a very fast storage system. Anything that requires a quick interface (high def video editing) will benefit from the speeds.

    Some other reviewers have commented that booting from the Pegasus isn't as fast as an SSD even though the transfer speeds are faster. Sequential speeds are faster, but for booting and application opening, you really want to look at random speeds. SSDs beat HDDs hands down, so booting from an SSD will be faster. This isn't any fault of Promise or Thunderbolt. It's just a fact of HDD limitations.

    If your needs justify the cost of the Pegasus, this is a great product.

    40 of 44 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    so far, so good

    • Written by from Brooklyn

    I'm only two data points, but I'm so pleased with the speed of weekly backups: I bought two R6 12TB Pegasii last winter and use them for storage and archiving, configured to RAID 10. They've been reliable: they're 105 miles apart, each attached to MacMinis, well-ventilated, and powered by APC power supplies. Early next year I'll start swapping out the 2TB drives for 4TB drives and I'll investigate formatting the disks with ZFS instead of HFS+. For uptime and backup, I'm thrilled.

    Carbon Copy Cloner write a Friday afternoon backup to a more-portable LaCie Thunderbolt drive and I train-net the data from one Pegasus to the other.

    37 of 41 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Don't be impatient!

    • Written by from Seminole

    So I've read a lot of complaints about this device online. However, I feel much of the disgruntled comments coincide with typical, Western Culture, impatience. Yes, the Pegasus Promise R4 really does take 10 hours to set itself up. You'll see blue lights flashing on the front until it's fully configured. Instructions are simple and accurate. 1) Plug it in, 2) Connect the Thunderbolt Cable [not included] to the upper right Thunderbolt port on back of R4 if facing the back of it, 3) Power up the RAID, 4) Do something else for 10 hours while it configures. The R4 is so quiet that you won't even know it's there save the pretty blue lights! It's blistering fast and very stable. I do a lot of AV work for the Department of Veterans Affairs. Writing to this drive takes care of the heavy lifting and shaves several days off of each project that I attend to.

    38 of 45 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    pairs well with mac mini for fileserving

    • Written by from Hamilton

    I've hooked the R4 to the latest mac mini (server edition) and it makes a really nice file sharing setup for the 35 people in our office. This and the mini replace an xserve and XServe RAID unit...I'm saving a lot of electricity and I haven't seen any performance issues for this sort of application.

    34 of 37 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Delivers!

    • Written by from Camarillo

    If we look away from the inflated price (first time buyers have to pay a premium) and a rather bulky and heavy design, it really is amazing what I am now capable of doing.

    I work in music and am now able to have LION on my laptop while my Snow Leopard partition, Audio drive partition and all my software reside in the pegasus.

    Quite simple, while at home i use my internal SSD with Lion.

    When at the studio, I boot from the pegasus and use Pro Tools and all my plugins etc with the Snow Leopard setup I have.

    Believe it or not, it is actually FASTER than my internal SSD would ever have been!

    I am in love with this setup and can recommend it to anyone!

    PCIe Pro Tools owners, get rid of it and go LE with Thunderbolt! I did and actually MADE money on the HD2 rig I had.

    I also bought the Thunderbolt display and have a perfect hun for everything!

    Its just amazing how my this has actually increased my mobility, effectivity and enthusiasm!

    Thanks Apple, Intel and Promise!

    33 of 35 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    The R4 has it all!

    • Written by from Omaha

    This is an extremely fast drive setup! I will admit, I had my doubts about spending the money on something like this, but after doing some research, I felt comfortable and made the leap!

    The R4 and the R6 come out of the box set at Raid 5, which gives you security in that if one drive fails, you will not loose your data. That being said, if you happen to have 2 or multiple drives fail...your out of luck. You can set it up for Raid 0, which would give your the fastest speeds, but you would loose the protection.

    While the setup is painless, it does take some time. Unbox the unit, plug in the power cable and the thunderbolt cable and then...wait 10 hours. 10 hours is how long it takes to have the drive format to Raid 5. Why they don't do this before it leaves the factory, I don't know, but...? I would recommend that you install the Promise Software bundle that is actually located not the drive, not on a DVD.

    After setup is finished, you are good to go!

    I have been experiencing Write Speeds of 385MBs-624MBs and Read Speeds of 182MBs-320MBs, depending on the file format and size. It's hands down much faster than my USB 2.0 drive and my Firewire 800 drive!


    I purchased this to backup my pictures files from iPhoto and Aperture primarily as well as my Music collection and my Movie Collection as well.

    The $999 price tag made sense after I added up the cost of my Music, my Movies and My Photos.

    If you are serious about backing up your computer and files, make a list of what you would spend to replace what you would loose and then buy a hard drive for that amount to use with Time Machine.

    35 of 39 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Amazing Performance

    • Written by from Bainbridge Island

    My only complaint about this drive is the plug-and-play. I have a MacBook Air at one end, the Promise Pegasus in the middle, and a standard Dell 24" monitor daisy-chained at the other end of the drive (yes, it works fine with a non-thunderbolt cable, just use the mini-display port adaptor) but getting them all connected is inconsistent. The only way that always works is to shut down the MacBook Air, plug in the Thunderbolt cable, turn on the PP drive, then boot up. However, sometimes I can just plug the MBA in while it's running, or when it's in sleep (clamshell mode) and sometimes both the PP drive and the monitor connect, sometimes only one connects.

    That's one small gripe. And this unit is not completely silent; however I keep it under the desk and cannot hear a thing there. I use Lightroom for photo editing and have about 2GB of photos on the PP drive. Access is nearly instantaneous. There's absolutely no comparison to my previous solution: MacBook Pro with FW800.

    Here are some benchmarks I ran. You can also compare these to a review that a customer did for the Lacie drive.

    Performance comparison of Promise Pegasus to standard MacBook Air SSD

    SDD | Promise Pegasus (MB/sec)

    uncached write (256k Blocks)
    167.06 | 328.42

    uncached read (256k Blocks)
    195.96 | 339.04

    Random uncached write (256k Blocks)
    172.45 | 321.93

    Random uncached read (256k Blocks)
    123.99 | 362.13

    33 of 36 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    PEGASUS ROCKS

    • Written by from sacramento

    I use w/FCP X /Motion 5 and a new iMac. No lag time.
    Very efficient/fast.

    27 of 30 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Excellent product

    • Written by from Fort McMurray

    Bought this to back my ever-growing photo / video collection. That being said, I have also backed up my entire 2TB hdd on the system, so that in the event of a total hdd failue on my Mac (iMac i7 - 27: 2TB hdd) then I am covered. Unlike other comments, mine arrived fully configured in Raid 5, and I was able to start copying files to the drive immediately upon hook-up. My only complaint, for this price, not including the thunderbolt cable is a joke. Especially when both the drive and the cable were ordered together, but the cable was shipped separately, and arrived 4 days after the drive. Someone really needs to look into this issue. Would I order another one if required, absolutely, the performance is refreshing.

    27 of 33 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Excellent Product - No worries no with one backup drive going bad.

    • Written by from MILWAUKEE

    Was shipped promptly. Plugged it in - connected thunderbolt cable (should be included but wasn't ) and away we went. It is quiet and fast! Wow!

    24 of 28 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Perfect storage

    • Written by from Berthoud

    We have had this product in use 24/7 since they first came out. To date we have had not a single issue with the device. We use it for server backup at our small business. Easy to use and flawless operation. Drive and device quality is top notch. Only downside is the high price as with all thunderbolt devices.

    21 of 24 people found this useful

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  • 4.0 out of 5 stars

    Great product, one irritation

    • Written by from READING

    They will tell you synchronization takes 10hrs. That's just plain wrong it's anything from 10 to 30+ hrs but once it's done its pain free high performance more than makes up for the wait.

    10 of 10 people found this useful

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    Nothing but trouble

    • Written by from Richmond

    I've spent more time talking to customer service about drives that appear to be dead, but aren't really, than I have in backing up my computer. Firmware updates to make it even come close to working. Who let the system see general public before it was working properly?

    Now a dead drive again. Or is it? Back to the phone and holding ...

    Maybe a simple plug and play raid for the Mac doesn't exist.

    18 of 26 people found this useful

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