I received my Thunderbolt Pegasus J4 and loaded it with 4 HGST Travelstar 1TB 7200rpm 2.5" hard disk drives. It is a really nice looking unit.
I found it wouldn't even see the drives without first loading the driver. Once the driver was loaded and rebooted, I used Disk Utility to create different RAID-0 arrays and tested them with BlackMagicDesign "DiskSpeedTest" with 4GB test option. I ran the test on a single disk, and 2-disk, 3-disk, and 4-disk RAID-0 configurations. I also ran the AJA test which produced similar results.
Results:
config ....... Write / Read MB/s
1 disk ....... 115 / 129
2 disk ....... 250 / 258
3 disk ....... 345 / 375
4 disk ....... 501 / 507
I like it!
Of course, running 4 hard disks in RAID-0 ... YOU WILL WANT TO KEEP A GOOD BACKUP STRATEGY!
-howard
...
Thanks hfg and WilliamG and everybody for sharing their results and experience! I really believe this is the only place you can find this kind of information! (If I'm wrong, please point me to more sources of similar info, I need them to make some decisions re: J4, etc.)
hfg; very cool results, considering these are Sata II drives! They're not on the list either... I'm thinking Promise really rushed the J4 out the door and it's not really ready for Prime Time yet. Sigh.
I'm really in a quandry with my J4, I may be sending it back. I've been back and forth with Promise support, and they tell me that only the SSD drives on their supported list will work (nothing larger than the 300Gb Intel; no Samsung 840's; (for me, it DID work with a Crucial M4 SSD 256Gb), but Promise says that if it's not on the list, the data may be corrupted or the drive may not show up, etc.
Just as an FYI, here's a transcript of several Promise support sessions:
Request:- 9th January 2013 at 5:57
yes, I did. The J4 appears on the MAC desktop, but it's not bootable, doesn't show up in boot Options. It did work with a Crucial M4 SSD. It doesn't work or show up for Booting with a Samsung 840 SSD. ???
Response By:- Pradeep Chidambaranath 9th January 2013 at 21:9
Hi Leslie,
We are sorry for the inconvenience caused to you. I have checked the compatibility list and could see that Samsung 840 SSD's are not compatible with the Pegasus J4 unit. Please go to the below link to get the compatibility list.
http://www.promise.com/media_bank/D... J4_First Release Compatibility List v1 2.pdf
Thanks and Regards
Pradeep C
Promise Technical Support.
Request:- 10th January 2013 at 7:44
I need to use a 500 or so GB HDD; will the Samsung 830 that's 500Gb work?
Response By:- Pradeep Chidambaranath 10th January 2013 at 21:15
Hi Leslie,
I have checked the compatibility and I could see that you can use 500Gb or 1TB SATA drives. If you want to use SSD's on the Pegasus J4 unit, then the maximum size SSD drive supported is 300Gb. We recommend to use the compatible drives. If you are using a non compatible drive, there are possibility for the unit to be corrupted or there are possibilities for potential data loss.
If you have any further questions please feel free to contact us and we will be more than happy to help you.
Thanks and Regards
Pradeep C
Promise Technical Support.
This is not very "Promising"
and I already have a new Seagate Backup Plus Desktop adapter that uses Samsung 840 drives just fine, and boots OSX and Windows just fine. I'm not sure I'll be keeping the J4, if I can return it. I suppose I could just keep it and wait for drivers and firmware... OR like hfg did, put 4 HDDs in and stripe away. Even a 2 disk stripe would be fine for data... 1TB of drives at 500 Mps for $400-$500 is not too bad, IMHO. Yeah, you'd really need to keep the backup thing going on. I'm not "up" on software raid striping reliability. Anyone have info on this??
Signed, somewhat discouraged with the J4, but PLEASED with the Seagate Backup Plus Desktop!