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Pegasus2 R4 drives
- Thread starter agtoau
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Quick question. I'm trying to figure out what drives to use and I don't understand the list of supported drives on their website. Do the two R4 models (one with HD's and one without) require different HD's? Sorry for the noob question, just want a reliable setup that is officially supported for the least amount of cash. Thanks.
They say they do so if you buy the cheaper product they don't have to help you when you use the drives supported on the one filled with HD's. I'm assuming apple had to talk them into supporting drives provided by apple in a diskless enclosure but they still want to encourage people buying the one that's overpriced for the storage you get.
All the drives listed work in the diskless Pegasus as far as I know. I used the Seagate 3TB disks in mine. I wrote up an article on my blog with my impressions of the device so far.
http://www.starcoder.com/wordpress/2014/01/pegasus2-impressions/
http://www.starcoder.com/wordpress/2014/01/pegasus2-impressions/
Those are great numbers Dysert for an r4 in Raid 5, i think.
Can you share what drives you have in there? was this diskless or drives included r4?
What are your strip and sector sizes? I'm not sure what 5G refers to.
Thanks.
Mine (diskless from Apple) will be here tomorrow and I have 4 SEAGATE ST3000DM001 Barracuda 3TB drives that should be here Friday. I'll post my results/impressions in this thread after I get everything set-up. I will be running this on a Late 2013 iMac though (config in sig), so no TB2 yet.
It varies.....I have an R4 with 4 Hitachi enterprise units in it...I've had one with Segates, but they've stopped using them now.
The Hitachi's have been rock solid, and all drives come with the extended warranty that you'd expect from units costing this kind of money. Yes, you can upgrade the drives, but frankly I'd source my own drives now....Once the warranty on the enclosure is done, I'm not paying Promises prices. Shopping around for matching enterprise drives isn't hard and the savings are big. Tech support there even suggested I do just this as I my current R4 is pretty much full. I was planning on pulling the 1TB drives ( which are still under warranty) and replacing them with 2's. Funds at present do not allow, so I just have to keep an eye on space. You do get what you pay for though....Top quality all metal enclosure a professional interface with the ability to run whatever RAID config you want, and good customer services. I've looked at the built down models and I just wouldn't go there.
I've got some partial results from the Pegasus2 R4 drive with the Seagate 3TB HDD's. I say "partial" because 2 of the 4 drives I ordered did not spin-up, so I'm running a temporary RAID0 config on 2 of the drives just for speed testing.
I'm impressed so far with the speeds, so I'm assuming when I get the other 2 drives plugged-in, the performance will pick-up even more.
I'm just attaching images of the current config and then the test results on all the drives I have hooked-up to my iMac. The "Drive Type" shows what HD was tested. The image without the "Drive Type" listed was the test run on my 2TB Time Capsule.
I had to use Xbench because Blackmagic decided to not work anymore for some reason. When I try to select the target drive it crashes. ????
Anyway...results below for a 1MB stripe size.
I'm impressed so far with the speeds, so I'm assuming when I get the other 2 drives plugged-in, the performance will pick-up even more.
I'm just attaching images of the current config and then the test results on all the drives I have hooked-up to my iMac. The "Drive Type" shows what HD was tested. The image without the "Drive Type" listed was the test run on my 2TB Time Capsule.
I had to use Xbench because Blackmagic decided to not work anymore for some reason. When I try to select the target drive it crashes. ????
Anyway...results below for a 1MB stripe size.
Attachments
Another unscientific measurement on my current set-up (2 x 3TB RAID0 w/512KB stripe):
I copied a large amount of data to/from the Promise/SSD. Timing done on my iPhone's stopwatch from the point of the release of the mouse button to the sound of the transfer being completed.
Time is measured in minutes:seconds.hundreths of a second (mm:ss.ddd)
21.43GB of Audio files (wav and mp3)
Promise —> SSD = 1:18.74
SSD—> Promise = 1:09.87
13.25GB of Various media files (.ai, .jpg, .mov, .xml, .mp4, .psd, etc..)
Promise —> SSD = 00:54.68
SSD —> Promise = 1:23.07
I copied a large amount of data to/from the Promise/SSD. Timing done on my iPhone's stopwatch from the point of the release of the mouse button to the sound of the transfer being completed.
Time is measured in minutes:seconds.hundreths of a second (mm:ss.ddd)
21.43GB of Audio files (wav and mp3)
Promise —> SSD = 1:18.74
SSD—> Promise = 1:09.87
13.25GB of Various media files (.ai, .jpg, .mov, .xml, .mp4, .psd, etc..)
Promise —> SSD = 00:54.68
SSD —> Promise = 1:23.07
Size?
I spoke with a techy at Promise and specifically inquired about the 3TB WD Caviar/Black. He directed me to their compatibility list. The only compatible WD drives are the 640GB (blue) and 1TB (black) drives and they are not compatible with the TB2.
Based on their specs, only 2 manufacturers work in their TB2 systems: Seagate (barracuda) and Toshiba (DT...).
I may have missed it in this tread, but can anyone confirm that the larger WD Caviar/Black drives work?
http://www.promise.com/media_bank/D...egasus2_Compatibility List v1.1-201301216.pdf
Update: I just read the entire thread and it appears several different sizes and brands work. It would be ideal if Promise updated their list.
I spoke with a techy at Promise and specifically inquired about the 3TB WD Caviar/Black. He directed me to their compatibility list. The only compatible WD drives are the 640GB (blue) and 1TB (black) drives and they are not compatible with the TB2.
Based on their specs, only 2 manufacturers work in their TB2 systems: Seagate (barracuda) and Toshiba (DT...).
I may have missed it in this tread, but can anyone confirm that the larger WD Caviar/Black drives work?
http://www.promise.com/media_bank/D...egasus2_Compatibility List v1.1-201301216.pdf
Update: I just read the entire thread and it appears several different sizes and brands work. It would be ideal if Promise updated their list.
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Does anyone have successfully install large capacity SSD (480GB ~ 1TB) in Pegasus R4/Pegasus2 R4?
My plan is to use 4 large capacity SSDs and create 2 sets of RAID0 in R4 for my audio sample libraries steaming, will the performance drop if 2 sets of RAID0 of 2 SSDs?
My plan is to use 4 large capacity SSDs and create 2 sets of RAID0 in R4 for my audio sample libraries steaming, will the performance drop if 2 sets of RAID0 of 2 SSDs?
Which Blacks?
Glad to hear it... are these the ones you are referring to?
WD4003FZEX
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FJRS5BA/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER
or these:
WD4001FAEX
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00B22A032/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVKYAVCKQS7C
Glad to hear it... are these the ones you are referring to?
WD4003FZEX
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FJRS5BA/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER
or these:
WD4001FAEX
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00B22A032/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVKYAVCKQS7C
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Hi everyone. First post.
I am doing the exact same thing so I had to chime in. Except I'm using 2 SSDs for sample libraries and 2 hdds for redundancy and storage of non-streaming files. If you are like me, you like to saturate your projects with multiple instances of multiple libraries at the same time. In this case, from the extensive research I've done, you are better off setting up your R4 in JBOD instead of 1 RAID0 array. The reason for this is because when you use RAID0, your large file speed transfer increases dramatically, but your reaction speed to random sample access is unchanged and RAID0 creates a single cohesive logic drive instead of having 4 so there is a "queue" of sorts that forms since it is handling files one at a time and the samples from multiple libraries will have to wait in line if it's too slow. The best approach would be to treat the 4 SSDs as 4 separate drives and allocate four libraries evenly across your SSDs in JBOD so that in theory, if 4 libraries are accessed at the same time and these 4 libraries are on four separate SSDs, then there is no bottleneck for the queue for random access. At the end of the day, you are getting around 400 MB/s/SSD but independently. And with TB2, you shouldn't top out the bandwidth. Hope that made sense.
That's what I'm going to do tomorrow once I receive my 2 Samsung EVO 1TB SSDs. In my case, I can easily randomly access 2 sample libraries at the same time provided I put the 2 libraries on the 2 separate SSDs. If I get nice results, I'll post. And if I'm wrong about any of what I said based on anyone else's experience, please do correct me. I'm still learning myself. But this is my plan of action so figured I'd share what I learned about how RAID works.
This is best suited for audio people. The RAID0 idea would benefit video editors the most but not audio since we need to access hundreds of small files at once instead of a few large files.
Thanks for the reply! So far I didn't see many users using SSDs in the Pegasus2 R4 unit (maybe I'm wrong). HDDs are definitely too slow for me since I'm running huge libraries from both EWQL and Kontakt. I have 4 SSDs and need to find an enclosure for 4 disk space (I'm using Akitio Thunberbolt duo right now).
I'll be waiting for the speed test that you may provide. Thanks for the reply once again.
That is painfully true. I filled my R4 with HDDs first, fully expecting it to perform perfectly since I was getting 500 MB/s reads. Then I learned about the reaction speed of HDDs vs SSDs. Big mistake on my part... dropped notes everywhere and clicks and pops if I ran more than one library at once. But at least I only wasted $180 for 2 HDDs I won't use instead of say $1000. I'll still keep them as cold spares. I had it set up as an all HDD RAID5. I can tell you now... it isn't up to snuff at all.
But I'm still waiting on my 2 SSDs. Will take a while to set up the new configuration but I'll post the usual BlackMagic benchmarks and actual performance commentary.
In any case though, you should look into the P2 R4 Diskless (assuming I determine that it works) because the T2 port offers a ton of bandwidth for the SSDs you're packing. I'm still waiting on my nMP too though. Meanwhile I'll have my MBPr with T1, which has enough bandwidth for my tests.
I have checked out the compatibility list via Promise's website of Pegasus2 R4, it does not mention anything about the SSD. All the SSDs I have are large capacity (from 500GB ~ 960GB) and I wonder it would work with the Pegasus2 R4 diskless unit.
I've done some research of the J4 unit with SSDs that are larger than 480GB, apparently the J4 does not take anything larger than 480GB (maybe some SSDs work?).
Once you got the SSDs for audio, you won't go back to HDD except for backups.
I read through the list too. It seems very limited and dated. No way it doesn't work with other models of HDDs. It's when I decided to take a chance on SSDs. I can always return it if it doesn't work anyway, but I REALLY want it to work.
I was spoiled with SSD the 1st time around, except I didn't know HOW spoiled. I had a Lacie Rugged 256GB SSD loaded with EWSO and EW Choirs. Worked beautifully. But then I got the entire Hollywood series and Pianos. Needed more space. I thought RAID would fix it. Nope. So yes, I agree. Once you try SSD, nothing else measures up.
Well... I got my SSDs. Specifically, 2 Samsung 1TB 840 Evos. Sad news is that the screws that come with the Diskless R4 do NOT fit the SSD. Slightly too big. Not sure if the screws are M3 or M3.5. I have ordered some M2.5 and M3 screws to be safe. But I have to wait even longer now to receive them. Woe is me.
I could rig something up to get it in, but anything nonmetal will have different thermal conductivity and malleability so I won't mess with that so it doesn't destroy the insides of my R4.
Sigh...
I could rig something up to get it in, but anything nonmetal will have different thermal conductivity and malleability so I won't mess with that so it doesn't destroy the insides of my R4.
Sigh...
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I should be getting my various screw sizes on Tuesday in the mail so I will post again then with updates on whether or not the 1TB SSDs actually jived with the R4.