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

Who I am: Post-Production supervisor. I manage a small facility with 10 bays, running everything from FCS to DaVinci, Smoke, ProTools and AfterEffects/Nuke. Along with the 500TB of XSAN pooled storage, I have been tasked with creating mobile workstations for DIT work, and decided to give this unit a try for primary storage.

I have been testing the R6(12TB) for about a month now. The bottom line is that this is a good piece of hardware. But, I want to stress that even though Thunderbolt is a snap, dealing with a RAID is not "easy". If you know how to properly install, update, and condition a RAID, then you will have solid, trouble-free operation.

This enclosure is quiet, runs decently cool even under heavy load, and provides consistent 500 MB/s performance even after filling it to 75% capacity and playing back 5 to 6 1080p streams. The biggest issue that I have had so far is that the MBP and iMacs that I have tested it with can't handle the throughput that this RAID provides. So, even though the Pegasus R6 can handle playing back 10 or 12 1080p 23.98fps streams, even a fully loaded Core i7 Mac will not be able to fully utilize the performance that the R6 can provide.

I gave the R6 4 out of 5 stars because of two issues:
1) Their website (especially to get tech support) is HIDEOUSLY complicated and difficult to use. This matters when I can't be reached and someone may need to find info to resolve an issue.
2) I have noticed a strange issue where the RAID seems to un-mount itself from the desktop if a machine turns off the display. Even when sleep mode is disabled, allowing the machine to shut off anything can sometimes bring up the dreaded "The drive was not ejected properly..." warning. I should point out that in my tests, no data has ever been lost or corrupted, and it has never done this while accessing data or while working on projects.

*One note about Quality Control (since another reviewer brought it up): Yes, bad drives will happen. But I have noticed that quality has dropped across the board in the past couple of years, with ALL manufacturers in storage. Just make sure that you buy it well before you need it, make sure that all of your firmware and drivers are up-to-date (can't stress this enough), condition the drives, and (if needed) swap out the bad ones.

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