Pegasus R6 - yay or nay??

[kultschar]

My Mac Pro is getting on a bit and my MB retina blows it away hence I now just plug it into a Apple 27" Display and loving life.

The trade off is I miss the storage of my Mac Pro hence been looking at storage solutions (10TB plus)

The Pegasus R6 jumps out but seems to get mixed reviews from failure to compatibility problems with Mac updates

Im aware every product has issues and maybe only minority of units will have this issue.

I have been offered a minty fully working original R6 for a very good price - any advice much appreciated.

Also is it likely to be supported for Yosemite in the future??

 

[amudgarden]

I've owned the Pegasus R6 for about a year now, and have never had any issues with it, compatibility or otherwise. I've had both SSDs and HDDs in it at one time or another, and it's always just worked fine. I use it for Time Machine backups.

It's software (Promise Utility) works seamlessly on my Mac Pro...and before that worked just fine on my iMac.

It's extremely fast...with HDDs (4TB Western Digital Red drives) I get around 500 MB/s read and write.

I would NOT recommend getting the Pegasus 2 R6 (the Thunderbolt 2 Pegasus). It's not faster enough than the first generation R6 to justify the extra price you'll pay.

I am not aware of any reports on issues concerning Yosemite's ability to work with the Pegasus.

 

[kultschar]

I've owned the Pegasus R6 for about a year now, and have never had any issues with it, compatibility or otherwise. I've had both SSDs and HDDs in it at one time or another, and it's always just worked fine. I use it for Time Machine backups.

It's software (Promise Utility) works seamlessly on my Mac Pro...and before that worked just fine on my iMac.

It's extremely fast...with HDDs (4TB Western Digital Red drives) I get around 500 MB/s read and write.

I would NOT recommend getting the Pegasus 2 R6 (the Thunderbolt 2 Pegasus). It's not faster enough than the first generation R6 to justify the extra price you'll pay.

I am not aware of any reports on issues concerning Yosemite's ability to work with the Pegasus.

Thanks for the reply, just what I was looking for.

Can I ask what your current setup is with your R6 with regards to drives and RAID type? I guess in theory then you can max it out to 6 x 4TB (24TB)

 

[amudgarden]

I use the Pegasus R6 as my Time Machine drive. It currently houses six 4TB Western Digital Red drives in a RAID 5 array. So, while its pure total storage space is 24TB, with the RAID 5 setup it's reduced to an effective space of 20TB. In RAID 0 you'll get the full 24TB, but get no protection from a drive failure.

I tested it in a RAID 0 setup, and it was noticeably faster than RAID 5, but I wanted the safety of surviving a single drive failure at some point in the future. At RAID 5 it gets around 500 MB/s read and write in the Blackmagic test. At RAID 0 it was around 600. It's fast as nuts.

 

[kultschar]

Thanks for the info - much appreciated.

Im tempted to go down the R6 road as they are now pretty cheap on eBay.

Could I make a 4 x 4TB RAID 5 setup (16GB - approx 12GB) and then add another 2 drives at a later date to increase my RAID capacity without losing all my data.

I believe the manual says you can add to a RAID but I read somewhere that there was a problem / bug doing this and the true increase capacity was not being acknowledged

 

[amudgarden]

Thanks for the info - much appreciated.

Im tempted to go down the R6 road as they are now pretty cheap on eBay.

Could I make a 4 x 4TB RAID 5 setup (16GB - approx 12GB) and then add another 2 drives at a later date to increase my RAID capacity without losing all my data.

I believe the manual says you can add to a RAID but I read somewhere that there was a problem / bug doing this and the true increase capacity was not being acknowledged

According to the manual, you can make a 4 drive RAID now, and keep the other two drives open to be added later if you want (or even use them now as "pass thru" drives to run on their own). I've never tested this on my own though, so I can't verify how smoothly adding drives will work. Sorry I can't give you more info on this issue...I took the slightly more expensive route when I first setup my RAID by adding all the drives and storage space up front, assuming that at some point in the near future I'll need it.