Reviews for Promise Pegasus 12TB (6x2TB) R6 RAID System

Item arrived DOA. The drives worked at first, but one quickly died. It was then I discovered the unit would freeze trying to repair the array. Tech support tried to only replace dead drive, but did replace as DOA when I insisted. Replacement unit was better but arrived with bad temp sensor. After another RMA, unit is finally working, and I'm satisfied. Two RMA's immediately after purchase should be an outrage, but at least Promise supported it and will for next two years. Don't expect to get this up and running quickly, expect 1-3 weeks setup. And even if it works for you out of the box, take out a drive from the array and test it can repair itself, or this problem will hide and you may not discover it until it's too late. Re: the Promise brand: adequate tech support - atrocious QA.

Fantastic performance BUT DO NOT BELIEVE YOUR DATA IS SAFE AND REDUNDANT !

Used mine for three months in default configuration (6 disks in RAID5 providing 10Tb) and disk 5 died. Logical drive does not mount anymore! No Access to data!

Currently awaiting replacement for failed disk and praying disk array will rebuid...

Seems like I also got a lemon. This has been the most unreliable product I have ever bought. I don't want to risk putting projects on this hard drive. When will it crash again? Unless you like gambling, don't buy this product.

We have been using this drive in our pro photography/video studio for a few weeks and have had very serious failures with the drive. First, one of the drives dropped offline and wouldn't respond (a tech support call and some special coding helped bring it back to life).
However, far more serious is that we are noticing that a lot of image files that we copied over to the drive from our original (previous) storage drive are now corrupt on the Promise Pegasus R6 drive. For a supposed cutting-edge item, intended for use by photo and video professionals, the system is a huge liability. Unfortunately we bought it on August 30th and are beyond our return window, however we are going to see if there's some way we can still return it, as it's worthless -- worth than worthless, it's a catastrophic liability.

Takes a long time (many hours) for initialization but them there are lots of bits. It runs so cool and quiet that except for the blue lights, one would not know it is on. Speed difference between FW800 Promise SmartStor and Thunderbolt Promise Pegasus is stunning.

When it works, it works, but when it doesn't it's a doozy. I'm sure that some have had great luck with it, but I haven't- and based on the other reviews, it's a real toss-up whether you'll get a good system or not. You're welcome to take your chances, just hope you don't end up in the 50% who got a bum product.

About me: I've worked video compositing over 12 years now, on a variety of platforms. I am currently running a 17"MBP, 512GB SSD, 16GB RAM; 2x27" Thunderbolt Monitors, and I bought a Promise Pegasus R4 8TB raid, and configured it carefully and correctly.

Day 1: Drive fires up. Faster than greased lightning, and pretty darn quiet overall. Quite impressed.

Day 2: Regional power outage, enclosure comes back up with 4 disks marked dead- I'm under a deadline, and the site was significantly less than helpful. Finally (the next day) get a tech to help out, and get all drives online (*the extra star is for him, he was helpful, polite, and knowledgeable.) Test, and all is well; copied a handful of files over to make sure.

...then I go on vacation for 3 weeks. No work, enclosure sits perfectly still the entire time.

Day 3 (of being used, first day back from vaca): Copying files- progress bar stops, hangs for an eternity... and a drive gets marked dead. Really? I checked the Promise Utility, this enclosure has 9 hours on it- no more. How does a disk get bad sectors after 9 hours of non-constant use? At this point, I'm uncertain that I care.

I run a Mac because I work for a living, and I want a machine that does likewise- I don't have the time to do unending maintenance when there's a job to do. None of the rest of my system ever slows me down; this raid enclosure has cost me almost as much time fixing it as it has run, and frankly my time is too valuable to keep using this enclosure- a shame, considering that for the brief time I had it working, it was smoking-fast.

1) I've had this unit a day.

2) I read the reviews, and thought, 'Hey, there's always a few lemons." Wrong.

3) On the initial build of a brand new system I've got bad sectors. Sigh.

4) The fact that this is happening to a brand new system, and appears to be systemic, leads me to believe that Promise has a serious problem.

5) The power off date (array testing) shows as exactly 28 days ago. So this was tested. So you're telling me the drive failed spontaneously in 28 days, when that was probably enough time to pack, ship, and have reshipped to the end user, and it's been run for a total of about 8 hours? No way.

So, what’s the deal? They most likely didn't actually do a low level test of this thing, which means that Promise isn't testing this unit, and if that's the case, then they really aren’t doing their job, especially given that all of the reviews for this thing talks about bad drives on unpack.

It’s not a good sign. This is not a quality supplier. Promise is doing brand damage, and it’s true: believe the reviews.

I'll probably be sending it back and waiting for something to come out from company that has a proper QA department. Avoid the headache and wait if you can.

Speed is unbelievable as many other reviewers will attest to. It's far faster than the 2TB second drive in my 2011 iMac.

But the best feature is the size and simplicity. I had it up and running in under 5 minutes, waited the 10 hours for the initialization, and it's worked perfectly ever since.

The new iMac was the reason I bought the Pegasus - I suddenly had 2.25 GB of disk space to potentially backup, and wanted to be able to back that up with no concern. My existing backups wouldn't handle it, and reshuffling drives would take a day, lots of copying, and ongoing management efforts.

It's not a bad idea to have 2x what you need for storage. Then you don't have to worry about running out space, and run into those awkward moments where your backups are offline for a month while you ponder your next step.

I have 4TB used and 6TB free at the moment. I imagine I'll be at 6TB used and 4TB free by the end of the year. When I need more space in a few years, I'll buy a new NAS and relegate this one to secondary backup.

Best drive bay I have ever had. I removed 3 of the stock drives and installed 3 240gb SSDs and and it works perfect. No problems, and the transfer rate on the 3 SSD (SATA-III) in RAID 0 in unreal. This is the first drive bay I have purchased that has actually did what it was expected to do, and done it well. (2 thumbs up)

I read all the reviews and spent hours looking for alternatives due to comments on noise and drive failures.

The drive is very quite. I read and was disturbed by people mentioning db levels (im in music) i almost did not buy this drive for the reviews... this drive is almost silent! and i am not happy off at people who rated this as noisy as it cost me hours of review time!

This drive is almost silent and you will not care about it running in your place. Its also reliable if you follow the simple guide to let it set itself up!

Get it you will be happy:)