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

I took delivery of the Pegasus a couple of days ago. It is totally meeting my expectations. I run it with a Macbook Air 2011 and this combo works flawlessly. Speed is fantastic and faster than the internal SSD hard disk. The R4 is hardly noticeable in a quiet room. I have used the second TB connector to hook up an older Macbook in target disk mode with a Thunderbolt adapter to pull over data.

Buying and setting up the system requires some minimal reading. It seems like not everyone of the reviewers here took advantage of that ...

The Pegasus R4 does not come with a Thunderbolt cable. That is all right if you know about it upfront and can then order the proper length.

Setup is a no brainer. It takes some 10 hours to synchronise, which is properly stated in the documentation. So I started it in the morning and when I came back from work, everything was set up.

If I shut down the Macbook Air with the R4 connected, the R4 properly switches off. And vice versa, the R4 switches on when the Macbook Air comes on. I've noticed a small delay when prompting for Username/Password, when the R4 is connected (compared to a plain Macbook Air). My Macbook Air is encrypted - not sure if this may cause the small delay (approx 5 sec).

After over 30 hours of waiting for the drive to set up, I found that the software would not let me set up any other than RAID 0, or RAID 5, which was the factory configuration. The "Wizard" has all options grayed out.
Contacting the online support just got me the response "I do not know what the problem is:".

I have read through the manual repeatedly and am no closer to being able to use this drive than when it arrived, and this is not my first Rodeo.
I'm guessing It's fine if you want RAID 5, but not for other options.

I've had it going for over a month now, very fast, reasonably quiet, editing, multicam, rendering and transfering files is fantastic.

When I first got it, it took approximately 20hrs for it to do it's thing before the lights stopped blinking! I thought there was something wrong with it, went on line for support, the support was slow in coming and too brief for my expectations.

thinking I should have got the R6 for more room.

I bought this 3 months ago and have just gotten around to backing up home movies and photos. It doesn't show up and says it is not compatible with my computer. It says to initialise but i don't know how to do it. Now I don't have technical support as I have gone over the 90 days with my new iMac! I want to love this product but it has to work first!

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.

Would not recommend this product, had one drive go "DEAD" after minimal use, spent hours rebuilding the physical drive and then initializing the logical drive, lost all my data, which wasn't much as I had just got the thing. Waiting to hear back from the techs at Promise (it is Labor Day weekend, go figure).

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.

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.

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.

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.