Customer Reviews and Ratings

3.5 out of 5 stars

Based on 35 reviews

  • 4.0 out of 5 stars

    If you need it, buy it, and set it up right.

    • Written by from Las Vegas

    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.

    54 of 56 people found this useful

  • 4.0 out of 5 stars

    Keep in mind...

    • Written by from Carson City

    that this device MAXES OUT AT 12TB. You can add drives larger than 2TB but you won't get more than 12TB of storage. I was disappointed by this, given that 4TB drives can be had easily. Also be aware that there have been issues with Mobile phones (European spectrum specifically) causing this device to unmount, when the phone is too close to Thunderbolt cables. This may have been a shielding issue with early Thunderbolt cables, but research it if you are a European customer.

    46 of 51 people found this useful

  • 4.0 out of 5 stars

    So far excellent

    • Written by from New York

    I have the 6 TB unit running now for almost 9 months 24x7. The RAID is attached to my Mac Mini Server and hosts 3 virtual machines (Win 2003 DNS Server, Linux Mail Server, Lion Web Server). No issues so far. Excellent performance, no lost disk, no sporadic disconnects. Worth five stars. I take one star off for the poor documentation and the cute but rather useless web interface. The biggest issue I see with the Promise Pegasus is the process of upgrading a system with disks of larger capacity. The documentation is rather silent about that.

    18 of 18 people found this useful