Promise Pegasus R6 with Seagate NAS HDD 4TB

[ssmed]

Holy thread resurrection!

I too have a Pegasus R6 (v1) with 6x2TB. After 6 years of faithful service I started getting loads of error messages, whenever I had the Promise app running it would beep every 5 seconds with some disk reset or other..

Whilst resurrecting threads...
I am on my second set of disks in both R6 (v1) arrays here, but they are really quite old now and they are used 24/7. After the second drive failure I replaced the lot in both cases. Still working well. My only problem is that they are a bot fussy about which TB port you use and you have to remember that.

 

[iCal]

So, 6 x 4TB drives installed and running.

Now it does its 10 hour "synchronisation" after creating the RAID 5 array (whatever that means).

I have bashed on some files and so far so good.

Therefore for £600 I should have created a 24TB native array and the old Pegasus is still quite a speedy thing.

Will use it as a backup on another iMac for now and just keep mirroring the new Lacie 36TB to the old Pegasus until it fills. Cannot be too careful with the photos and videos of the kids when they were little!

 

[Lemannsquattro]

I just thought that i would report the successful use of Seagate 6TB drives (ST6000DX000) in a Promise Pegasus R6 in Raid5. These drives are NOT on Promises list of approved drives.

Total usable size - 30TB

I am getting about 700MB write and 820MB read, which is pretty damn good and probably getting near the limits of TB1

It is still synchronising but I will retest once i get a bit of data into it (i have about 6TB to chuck in).

I used 512KB stripe size with 4KB Sectors as i do mostly video and photo work with large file sizes.

R6 RAID5 6X6TB GRAPH 2 by dtpearson1975, on Flickr

I had some issues when i had only 4 of the 6TB drives in the R6 with slow reads (only 250MB/sec) and janky writes with fast speed (500MB/sec) but it bounced up and down a lot. They worked fine in Raid0 (nice and fast) but not in Raid5. But all of these issues seem to have disappeared with six of the drives in Raid5.

If i have any issues i will report back. I am keen to see what happens when i have lots of data in there.

Hi dtpearson, just checking to see how your 6Tb drives are holding up. Did you run a test with the drives over 80% used capacity to see if they unmounted and lost the array?

 

[Lemannsquattro]

Hi iCal, how did you go with the 4Tb Ironwolf drives? Any issues or is it working ok.

Holy thread resurrection!

I too have a Pegasus R6 (v1) with 6x2TB. After 6 years of faithful service I started getting loads of error messages, whenever I had the Promise app running it would beep every 5 seconds with some disk reset or other.

So I could not lose my 8TB of data and bought a Lacie 6Big 36TB version. But guess what it only works on USB with my iMac 2014 as TB2 not backward compatible with the new TB3 on the Lacie even though I bought the Apple adapter which promised to work (no pun intended). Either way I copied all my data off, albeit slowly and have ordered a new iMac 2017 model which will go fast on TB3 (expensive afternoon).

No way I buy another Promise product; their support for replacement HDDs is limited to such a small list and 6 years after purchase none are available.

But now I have a Pegasus R6v1 with some disks reaching EOL.

So today I ordered 64TB Ironwolfs, Seagate IronWolf 4TB NAS Hard Drive to stick in it. No they are not on the compatibility list but good luck finding any disks that are.

So tomorrow they arrive and I will stick them in, fill them up past 90% in Raid 5 (which seems to be a failure point judging by my many internet searches on the topic) and see if they work.

If they do then to any others with an old R6v1 this could be a way of making it 24TB, or I could have just wasted £600 on 6x4TB NAS drives. We will see and I will let the internet know.

 

[Lemannsquattro]

I would also like a follow up, if you don'd mind. I would like to add 6x6tb HGST-NAV drives to my Pegasus R6. So, how are your current 6tb drives working for you?

Thank you in advance,

Michael

Hi Michael, did you upgrade to the 6x6Tb? How did it go?

 

[ssmed]

Holy thread resurrection! ..... If they do then to any others with an old R6v1 this could be a way of making it 24TB, or I could have just wasted £600 on 6x4TB NAS drives. We will see and I will let the internet know.

Be careful just buying new drives, our oldest R6 had to be retired year as it would run for about 3 weeks and then we would get a drive failure - the drives had not failed and we are using them elsewhere. After multiple attempts, a new tray and several disks the risk of losing a lot of data (24TB without RAID) I bought a new array. Given that the box had run for 7 years permanently on with at least a couple of battery changes for the UPS I do not feel aggrieved. A more recent purchase (same model) and a smaller R2 are still going strong.