Promise Pegasus 12TB (6x2TB) R6 RAID System

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

Customer Reviews and Ratings

3.5 out of 5 stars

Based on 35 reviews

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  • 3.0 out of 5 stars

    Blazing Fast Operation Out Of The Box with Significant Shortcomings

    • Written by from Allison Park

    The drives are beautiful and the speed is insane for someone like me coming from eSATA and FW800 interfaces. This speed is what this decade would have been thought to bring in computer technology. I got two of these. There are two problems. First, the web site of the manufacturer is practically worthless. It is designed for IT support staff from large corporations and they definitely assume that an individual who may not have a Masters degree in IT is not an end-user of this device. You can't even register the device, whether or not a firmware update is new is at best a guessing game. More importantly, BEWARE, as of today, these devices do not spin down or go to sleep when my brand new iMac goes to sleep. Tech support's answer is "wait for a new firmware". They do run hot in the summer. They are by no means quiet. Pairing them up with a new iMac, which is essentially very quiet means downgrading your experience. I can hear these babies from my bedroom, which is 20 feet away from my office. That is where the ability to put them to sleep is important. I also worry about reports of RAID 5 not coming to fruition when one drive fails. Hope I won't find out. In short, great speed, cosmetically beautiful with what is at best poor tech support and drives that suffer from a serious case of insomnia.

    3 of 3 people found this useful

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  • 3.0 out of 5 stars

    The reviews were pretty accurate.

    • Written by from Spanish Fork

    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.

    5 of 6 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Best advice...

    • Written by from Clearwater

    We didn't use the default configuration. Instead, create your RAID using 5 drives and leave one as a hot spare.... assuming you are using a RAID to protect data not acquire speed.

    That being said, these things take a long time to setup, maybe 2 days. But after the wait, the device is a winner.

    6 of 6 people found this useful

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    BEWARE: RAID5 fails with one disk down !!!

    • Written by from Meyrin 2

    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...

    12 of 17 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Works without a charm

    • Written by from Spaarndam

    I've hooked this up to my 2009 Macbook Pro and my late 2012 Imac 27". Both performed without a hitch, in the iMac setup I have it hooked up in combination with two external thunderbolt displays and it is still very fast.

    The speed is very impressive and I am very pleased with it.

    6 of 7 people found this useful

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    Lemon

    • Written by from Silver Spring

    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.

    48 of 59 people found this useful

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    not compatible

    • Written by from new york

    be warned...this product is not compatible with the newer thunderbolt ports on mac. video and image files suffer dropouts

    55 of 76 people found this useful

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    Serious failures

    • Written by from CARBONDALE

    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.

    67 of 72 people found this useful

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    Crashed in first 2 Days

    • Written by from Greenbelt

    Died in the first 3 days - hard and without any warning. Went online and started reading about this product. Seems like you have some percentage chance of getting a good one but a higher chance of not. At least I had my problem in the first couple days so I can return, for many people it showed up after the return for refund period.

    It's disappointing because seems like a great choice if it lived up to their description.

    41 of 46 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Quiet and Cool

    • Written by from Los Altos

    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.

    18 of 22 people found this useful

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  • 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

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  • 2.0 out of 5 stars

    When it works...

    • Written by from Lake Forest

    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.

    41 of 52 people found this useful

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  • 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

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    Just received it, drive 5 is bad.

    • Written by from Sacramento

    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.

    58 of 71 people found this useful

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  • 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

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Working Perfectly - My Data Finally Feels Safe

    • Written by from Toronto

    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.

    16 of 20 people found this useful

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    Problem with Pegasus

    • Written by from Northcote

    I've bought a PegasusR6 and top line iMac for video editing and I am having a lot of problems. Only two weeks old and drives keep dropping out and the rebuild time is huge. Last rebuild took more than 24 hours. I would advise doing extensive checks to ensure the drive is operating normally before launching into any jobs where data and time are critical. Pegasus support have sent one new drive to replace one that dropped out but have offered no suggestions about why a brand new drive would drop out. I couldn't recommend it based on performance so far. Traditional boxes and ATTO cards are much more reliable and almost as fast. Typical of these reviews that you have to rate the product and no stars isn't possible. So I have to give it a one.

    60 of 75 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    2 Thumbs up

    • Written by from novato

    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)

    16 of 22 people found this useful

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    3 Pegasus R6 Units - All gone bad

    • Written by from North Vancouver

    Purchased 2 units. During initial synchronization 2 drives marked bad. Returned complete pegasus unit. Second unit's controller refuses to report the time/date properly in the logs. Reporting every date as Feb 1970 even though in the console the date is showing correctly.

    Purchased replacement pegasus unit for returned one, 1 month later. 4 hours after powering it on for first time, 2 drives marked bad.

    Something has gone horribly wrong here Promise, and reading the other comments, I am certainly not alone.

    If your data is critical - this is not the drive to use.

    69 of 72 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    Almost didn't buy due to reviews

    • Written by from Aurora

    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:)

    28 of 33 people found this useful

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