( Please read my disclosure on product reviews here. )
Recently, the folks at Promise Technology sent me an 8-bay Pegasus2 Thunderbolt RAID to evaluate.
NOTE: This is due to my meeting Elaine Kwok, product marketing manager for Promise, at the recent Storage Visions 2014 conference. You can hear her audio interview here.
As I was researching and testing this unit, I realized that this article needs to be part technical review and part a discussion on our expectations on storage technology today.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The Promise Pegasus2 Thunderbolt RAID is fast, easy to setup, fast, easy to use, fast, provides a ton of storage space, fast, and runs like any other Macintosh hard disk. Oh, and did I mention that it is fast? It is.
It provides massive storage, excellent speeds, all at a reasonable price. It isn’t as fast as an all-SSD unit, but it costs far less and holds far more.
WHAT I WAS SENT
Promise sent me their latest Pegasus2 8-bay RAID, containing eight 3 TB drives configured as a RAID 5. It formatted to 21 TB of usable space. All the drives were installed prior to shipping. It has a retail price of around $3,500, including all drives.
NOTE: Here’s an article that describes what RAID 5 means.
In the box are seven Quick Start Guides in fourteen languages. New users should quickly skim this because of an important note on synchronization. Connecting the drive is trivial: Plug in two cables – power and Thunderbolt – turn on your computer and the Pegasus, and get to work.
The Pegasus arrived formatted, but not synced. What syncing does is build the parity data between all the drives so that if a drive dies, you don’t lose all your data. While the drive is useable immediately out of the box, you don’t get access to its full performance until syncing is complete. For a drive this size, syncing took 10 hours, 42 minutes and 33 seconds. (Um, why, yes, I did time it.)
IMPORTANT NOTE: Before doing any work requiring maximum performance, wait until syncing is complete. The best advice is to plug the unit in and let it do its thing overnight. In the morning both you and it will be ready to work.
I ran these tests based upon the factory default settings. You can improve performance a bit more by turning on “Forced Read Ahead,” which is disabled by default. However, this requires working with Terminal and the Unix command line interface. Promise can provide instructions.
This unit comes configured as a RAID 5. You can also configure it using Disk Utility as a RAID 0. This will be faster than RAID 5, and store more, but in the event one drive dies, you lose all your data. I happily use smaller RAID 0’s in my editing. But for something this big, I want the security of knowing my data is safe in the event of a drive crash.
WHAT MAKES THIS SPECIAL
The Pegasus2 is the first RAID that supports Thunderbolt 2, the new communications protocol that was released with the new Mac Pro. This new protocol supports data transfer rates up to 2.2 GB/second.
NOTE: That preceding paragraph is a completely true statement, but it leads to some wildly incorrect conclusions. I’ll explain further in the next section.
Thunderbolt 2 is fully compatible with Thunderbolt 1 devices. As you’ll see below, the Pegasus works perfectly – though not at the same speeds – with both iMacs and Mac Pros, and operating systems 10.8.5 and 10.9.1. In other words, you can use this unit on any Mac with a Thunderbolt connection.
THE PROMISE RAID UTILITY
Shipped on the Pegasus RAID is a utility that allows you to configure and monitor your RAID. I found this utility cleanly designed, simple to navigate and with access to the controls that I needed to configure and monitor the unit.
My only wish for this was that it would allow us to turn on Forced Read Ahead and avoid a trip to the Terminal.
THE THUNDERBOLT TRAP
Thunderbolt 1 supports data transfer speeds (also called “bandwidth,” or “data transfer rate”) of up to 1.1 GB/second. Thunderbolt 2 supports data transfer speeds of up to 2.2 GB/second. EXCEPT… that is the speed of the connection between the two devices. Actual device speeds are less, sometimes FAR less, than the protocol will support.
In the “olde days” of USB 2 and FireWire, both of which are communications protocols between hard disks and computers, the protocol was slower than the hard disk. So the protocol determined how fast your storage could transfer data.
Now, with Thunderbolt, the protocol is FAR faster than a hard disk. This means that the speed of your storage is determined by the speed of the hard disk, NOT the protocol.
Here’s the secret formula: For every hard disk in your storage device, the data transfer rate is about 120 MB/second. There is some variation between drives, but this number is a good place to start.
Solid State Drives (SSD) will transfer data faster that spinning hard disks, but even an SSD drive is slower than the protocol itself.
NOTE: The Pegasus2 only uses spinning hard disks, driven by a hardware RAID controller, without any SSD acceleration. Hardware RAID controllers are MUCH faster than software RAID controllers. (Drobo, for example, uses a software RAID controller.)
Here are some speed examples:
In other words, the Thunderbolt protocol is screaming fast. But the speed of your storage is determined by the number of drives contained in it.
NOTE: For comparison of how much speed you need, a single ProRes 422 clip in HD requires about 18 MB/second for playback. AVCHD files require about 3 MB/second. So if you are doing single-camera editing, ANY Thunderbolt device will be fast enough for editing. The challenge comes in editing multicam footage, or higher resolutions than 1080p HD.
The advantage to the Pegasus2 supporting Thunderbolt 2 is that, while the RAID won’t take advantage of the speed of this protocol, any Thunderbolt 2 devices (think monitors) that are connected into the Pegasus will get the full benefit of the Thunderbolt 2 protocol.
MAC PRO PERFORMANCE TESTING
I decided to do four types of performance testing:
All speeds were measured using the Blackmagic Design Disk Speed Test utility.
The Pegasus2, when directly attached to the Mac Pro, generated these results. Write speed shows how fast the unit records information (think importing, rendering and exporting), while the Read speed shows how fast it plays back information (think editing).
These speeds are the fastest of any RAID I’ve measured to date.
However, compare the speed of the Pegasus to the internal SSD drive of the Mac Pro. WOW! Much faster. Obviously, we should only use the internal Mac Pro drive for all of our editing.
Wrong. Really, really wrong!
First, the internal Mac Pro drive only holds 256 GB of data. Just one season of my 2 Reel Guys web series has more than 2 TB of data, which far exceeds the size of any SSD drive affordable by mere mortals. Or, more recently, my FCP X training created 8 TB of master video files! SSDs can’t handle media files of this size.
Second, as I discovered later in my testing, performance drops when background processes run, in fact, it often fell 30 – 50%. This means that we can’t count on consistent performance from the internal drive, because it is serving the needs of the operating system, all active applications, and all background processes. What may be fast enough one second is too slow a second later because some process is now running in the background.
Third, it is easy to add more external storage. Expanding the internal SSD is not simple.
Fourth, it is easy to move external storage from one computer to the next by simply unplugging the cable.
The internal drive is useful and has some advantages for certain specialized edits, but external media storage is essential for any except the smallest projects.
I also wanted to test whether there was any loss in speed when connecting a second RAID to the Promise. These are the results when connecting a G-Technology 2-drive RAID 0 directly to the Mac Pro.
NOTE: The G-Tech, too, is a Thunderbolt device, but its speeds are less because it only contains two drives. Hence my earlier discussion about the protocol not determining the speed of your storage.
These are the results when connecting the G-Tech RAID as part of a three-drive chain. The RAID was at the end of the chain. It was faster, in fact. So there does not appear to be any significant speed loss when daisy-chaining devices. Essentially, the G-Tech transferred data at the same speed, regardless of whether it was attached directly to the Mac Pro, or as part of a storage chain.
NOTE: Another weird fact is that test results vary. Hard disk speed is a factor of how empty it is – empty is faster, how big the files are – bigger files transfer faster, and the size of the data blocks being transferred at one time – bigger blocks transfer faster.
iMAC PERFORMANCE TESTING
Here’s the speed of the iMac’s internal Fusion drive, running under Mac OS X 10.8.5, in a dual-boot configuration. Notice that it is about 1/3 the speed of the Mac Pro, even though the iMac is accelerated with an internal SSD drive.
NOTE: It was when running this test that I saw the 35% drop in performance when a background process started running.
To further complicate matters, this speed test shows the same iMac, running under Mac OS X 10.9.1, and accessing its internal drive. The speeds are 50% slower than when running 10.8.5. This is probably because the dual boot drive doesn’t have enough free space. Using the internal drives is easy, but is no guarantee that we will get consistent performance.
Here’s the speed of the Pegasus direct connected to the iMac running 10.8.5. Not as fast as when connected to the Mac Pro, but still pretty darn quick.
Here’s the speed of the Pegasus direct connected to the iMac, running 10.9.1. Essentially, while the speed of the Pegasus is not as fast as the Mac Pro, the speeds are pretty much the same for both 10.8.x and 10.9.x.
Here’s the speed of the G-Tech when connected to the iMac. In this case, it is about 10% faster on the iMac than on the Mac Pro. (The speeds were the same regardless of operating system, and regardless of whether the unit was directly connected or looped through the Pegasus.)
REAL-WORLD TESTS
The Pegasus copied a 23 GB file from the Mac Pro’s internal drive to the Pegasus at more than 800 MB/second. I ALWAYS want file transfers to go faster, but these are excellent numbers.
The Pegasus duplicated a 23 GB file stored on the Pegasus back onto the Pegasus at about 550 MB/second. This is slower because the file needs to be read from the RAID, then written back to the RAID all at the same time.
MULTICAM EDITING
Multicam editing taxes your computer and storage systems more than any other form of editing.
So, to test this, I created 12 versions of a 12 minute 2 Reel Guys episode.
Each movie was 23 GB in size, using the ProRes 4444 codec with a 720p image size and 59.94 frame rate. (ProRes 4444 is both the highest quality and largest file size of all the ProRes codecs.)
Upon importing into Final Cut Pro X v10.1, the software immediately started creating audio waveforms and transcoding the media into proxy files (at my request). Just as a test, I tried doing multicam editing while those background processes were running. Didn’t work, I got dropped frames immediately. It took the system about fifteen minutes to finish all its prep work.
Once the background processing was done, FCP X could play and edit a nine-camera multicam clip with image quality set to Better Quality with no dropped frames. Wow. Just, wow…
NOTE: I did get dropped frames when trying to play 12 clips, however.
As you can see, playing all nine streams did not tax the storage system….
… or the CPUs.
However, my STRONG recommendation for multicam editing is to edit using proxy files. For example, the Mac Pro edited all twelve proxy streams without breaking a sweat. Based on what I saw, I would expect the Mac Pro, combined with a Pegasus RAID to easily, easily edit 24 streams of multicam video with horsepower to spare.
MISC. OPERATIONAL NOTES
The Pegasus follows the computer in terms of sleep. If the computer goes to sleep, so does Pegasus. It can take up to 20 seconds for it to wake back up after going to sleep. It the computer doesn’t go to sleep, the Pegasus stays awake, too.
The Pegasus took longer to mount to the desktop than the G-Technology drives. G-Tech was ready in about five seconds. The Pegasus was ready in about 15.
The RAID management tool shipped with the Pegasus is very nicely done.
CONCLUSIONS
The Pegasus2 is a very fast RAID, easy to setup and as easy to use as any other Macintosh hard disk.
It runs on any Mac that has a Thunderbolt connection, with the added advantage of supporting the new Thunderbolt 2 protocol. It runs the fastest on a Mac Pro, but, for most editing projects, the Promise has speed to burn for any editing project on any Mac.
Apple has long supported these devices for any intensive media application, and, now, after working with one myself, I can agree.
The Promise Pegasus2 Thunderbolt RAID is an amazing tool at a very reasonable price.
Learn more at www.promise.com.
142 Responses to Product Review: Promise Pegasus2 RAID
← Older Comments Newer Comments →-
Al B. says:
January 29, 2014 at 5:37 pm
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Fabrizio Rizzo says:
January 30, 2014 at 5:31 pm
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Fabrizio Rizzo says:
January 30, 2014 at 5:37 pm
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Barry Wul says:
February 13, 2014 at 12:32 pm
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Barry Wul says:
February 13, 2014 at 12:33 pm
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Blair Thornton says:
February 13, 2014 at 12:40 pm
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Victor says:
February 13, 2014 at 1:16 pm
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Michiel says:
February 21, 2014 at 8:37 am
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Victor says:
February 21, 2014 at 12:03 pm
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Josh says:
February 18, 2014 at 8:35 pm
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Victor says:
February 21, 2014 at 12:18 pm
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Barry Wul says:
February 21, 2014 at 2:13 pm
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Barry Wul says:
February 21, 2014 at 2:03 pm
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Michiel says:
February 22, 2014 at 9:54 am
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Michiel says:
February 24, 2014 at 11:00 am
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Larry Jordan says:
February 24, 2014 at 1:31 pm
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Victor says:
February 24, 2014 at 3:58 pm
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Agustín says:
March 15, 2014 at 7:50 am
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Michiel says:
March 15, 2014 at 12:42 pm
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Agustín says:
March 16, 2014 at 6:17 am
← Older Comments Newer Comments →The best thing you can do is isolate this first. Once you know where the problem is coming from, you can deal with the appropriate tech support. It seems you are on the right track. If you can isolate it, you likely won’t be dealing with all three companies.
Now that the P2R8 is fully sync’d and ready for action, BM disk test with ForcedReadAhead enabled with a RAID-5 logical volume is showing 816.1 & 795.7 MB/s (read , write respectively).
My system wasn’t perfectly idle during this test though. In fact, an 11-TB data merge between old firewire arrays is in progress. 56% after 18.5 hours, yeesh! Can’t wait to move this data once and for all to the Pegasus2…
I did observe the oscillation of the I/O performance during the test. Informally, i’d say I was able to observe 30-50%-ish swings as the OS dealt with the the other massive copy threads running in the background. I think I saw it slow down to the low 300 MB/s range at one point.
Thanks for a great article and helping us understand how this all really works.
Much appreciated Larry!
-Fabrizio
One more question: Is there any benefit to enabling the adaptive write back cache option?
After receiving a new Pegasus2 2/24 RAID DOA due to a defective Drive (Preinstalled by Promise Technology) and pathetic customer service / support from Promise Technology; I’d caution others from seeking any technology solution from Promise and searching elsewhere.
After my RAID reported errors almost immediately after installation (on a new MacPro 2013) I immediately contacted technical support. (First, I had to register the unit online; which automatically assigned a warranty expiration date based upon the date the unit shipped from their warehouse to the authorized reseller, not based upon the sales / ship date to me.) Regardless of the detailed information I provided regarding the multiple bad sector detections and subsequent designation of the drive as being bad (by the promise RAID management software) Tech support would not even begin cooperating until I generated a specific HTML based report via their software & uploaded it to Promise’s Tech Support.
They did immediately (upon receipt of the report) acknowledge that the drive I reported as being DOA was indeed dead. In order to receive a warranty replacement I was informed that I could either return the defective drive; after which I would be shipped a replacement or I could provide a credit card # for them to place a hold of about $250.00 (on a drive that can be purchased on Amazon for $109 with free 2-day shipping) and that they would only provide complimentary GROUND shipping. If I wanted Next Day or 2-Day shipping; it would be at my expense. Considering that this was a defective unit shipped from Promise; I was astounded by the lack of support on a $3,500.00 piece of hardware. I provided the Credit Card # and finally received the replacement drive, only to discover that I was expected to pay the return freight on the defective drive.
This was bad enough; but part of my dissatisfaction is rooted in the fact that such a high-end RAID system was equipped (once again by Promise Technology) with consumer grade Segate Baracuda Drives. Considering the premium price they charge on storage size; one would think that they would at least use the higher grade Enterprise Grade drives from Seagate. In fact; at the time that tech support authorized the drive replacement, I asked if it would be a problem if I simply installed a 3TB Western Digital Red drive that I had on-hand as a spare for a separate RAID system. I was informed that the WD Red was not on their list of approved drives; and would not be supported. I later downloaded Promise Technology’s complete list of approved drives for the Pegasus2 system and discovered that only 2 drives (in 3 TB capacity) were on the approved list; both of which were lower-tier consumer grade models. There is no indication that they ever tested any higher quality drives or what system requirements of the Promise2 RAID would limit full compatibility with any other drive; just a failure to reference any other models. My personal opinion / interpretation is that they leave the higher quality (higher priced) drives off of their list as a convenient excuse as to why they do not provide better drives in the first place. It seems counter-intuitive to produce an ultra high-speed storage system aimed largely towards video editing, then supply that system with anything other than enterprise level hard drives. Based upon this experience, I will NEVER purchase another product produced by Promise Technology. I have purchased products from a number of other manufacturers over the years and have never had such a poor experience with any other companies tech support staff.
Minor Correction, the system was a Pegasus2 8/24, not 2/24
Barry, I feel for you.
My thoughts are the same as yours, this unit is for professionals and should NOT ship with consumer level drives but Enterprise drives. It has made me hesitant to purchase.
Barry
The RMA process you described is the norm.
Product registration and providing a subsystem
Report is a must. The subsystem report contains
An X-ray of the unit. This info is used for diagnosing and troubleshooting
Purpose as well as warranty purposes.
With regard to warranty validation. It sounds
You overlooked the statement in the CRM (customer relationship manager)
User interface. We honor warranty two ways:
-manufacturing date based off chassis serial number
Or
-customer provide invoice
The above is very standard practice.
Regarding supported drives these units come integrated
So off the shelf drives ate not supported.
What was overlooked was (I will personally
Look into this) our DOA policy.
If the unit has been in your possession
Less than 30 days we will make the exemption
And cover an advanced replacement and also
A call tag for the return of the defective part.
You will be contacted shortly.
Please note that a failed disk out of the box is
Not normal. It’s plausible the unit may have been
Mishandled in shipping.
In any case I apologize for the inconvenience.
Give us the opportunity to make this right.
The support manager will reach out to you shortly.
Victor Pacheco
Hi Victor,
I can confirm that your warranty-date issue is real. My warranty expired in 2013 while i have it less than a week. There was no way whatsoever to correct this date.
I can’t care less to be honest. I’ll return my Promise Pegasus asap and i don’t want a replacement. Mine did not mount on the desktop. I have posted a comment on this forum earlier.
Not only this 2000 euro box was a pain in the neck, your registration-procedure is a pain in the neck as well. I received a reply from the store that my ‘request to return it is pending and that this can take a couple of days’.
Very disappointing.
Cheers,
Michiel
Michiel,
Upon product registration there is a section clearly highlighted in red:
Product warranty will be honored two ways:
-Valid invoice showing proof of purchase (attach invoice at the time you open a support case or RMA)
-No invoice: Warranty defaults to the unit manufacturing serial number (manufacturing date)
And no, the end user cannot modify the warranty date. Only the Promise Support personnel can do that.
Gauging the product warranty based the product serial number is standard practice.. The most important part is that we will honor the invoice date.
Email me offline if i can do anything for you. On the technical problem at hand.. surely there is a logical explanation.
Not sure that enough information was exchanged. Sounds like a configuration problem at a high level. The storage has a clean bill of health. I would love to look into this for you.
Best Regards,
Victor Pacheco
victor.p@promise.com
I was going to purchase the R8 with 3TB modules until I learned the modules are Seagate hard drives, which are terrible and have the highest failure rate.
Backblaze, a cloud data backup provider, recently published their experience with different brands of hard drives. Results indicate Seagate Barracuda hard drives have approximately a 10% annual failure rate. This is terrible and unacceptable if the R8 will be used for archiving critical data.
Two questions for Promise Technology: Why did they choose to include/ship Seagate Barracuda hard drives in the Pegasus2? Is it possible to purchase Pegasus2 spare hard drive modules with Toshiba hard drives instead?
NOTE: Toshiba DT01ACA300 3TB hard drives are compatible with the R8.
Josh,
Promise integrates the drives in house. Meticulous screening takes place on each drive with media scanning end to end.
Drives with greater than one grown defect are rejected from the line. This improves reliability tremendously by weeding out “infant mortality” drives. BTW we also ship Toshiba DT01ACA300 with Pegasus2 line.
Best Regards,
Victor Pacheco
Yet my Pegasus2 8/24 arrived with a drive that immediately reported dozens of defects / bad sectors. The outer and inner boxes were in perfect condition with no signs of abuse or damage. Since modern hard drive heads retract and lock away from the physical media when properly powered down; I find it difficult to believe that my DOA defective drive was in perfect operational condition when it left your factory.
While it has been a bit over a week since I last posted / responded (busy with family issues) I would like to finally respond to Victor from Promise Tech and his response to my initial posting.
First, the one positive thing that I can state is that I did receive a prepaid return label for shipping the defective drive.
That of course does not make up for the fact that despite my pointing out to tech support (over the phone) that a DOA drive replacement should not have been replaced via ground shipment (with only option for express shipment being at my personal expense). At that point I was so upset (the tech’s telephone skills were less than optimal) I was unwilling to pay anything additional to/for Promise products. I chose the free FedEx Ground; since prior experience with delivery from California typically took 3-4 days total (with packages continuing to transit over the weekend.) With shipment on a Friday; I figured the free ground shipment would only delay delivery by about a day over 2nd day delivery. Unfortunately, it ended up taking just under a week. A major inconvenience which could have been avoided via proper handling by Tech Support.
Victor did not address the point that I raised (and has now been raised by several other individuals) about the fact that Promise preinstalls the RAID with consumer grade hard drives that do not have a stellar history of reliability. As I and others have pointed out; a high capacity Thunderbolt 2 RAID is (or should logically be) targeted towards a professional audience with a critical need for both speed and reliability. Not utilizing enterprise level drives is completely counter-intuitive. It’s akin to buying a Ferrari and putting the least expensive generic tires available on all 4 wheels. Sure you can go fast; but you’ll be holding your breath and keeping your fingers crossed the entire time – praying that you don’t experience a blow-out.
My personal distaste for Seagate drives comes from personal experience with a RAID system that WAS equipped with Seagate Enterprise level drives. (Level 5 RAID) After the first year of relatively light use, I began to experience ongoing drive failures, every few months. While Seagate did replace the drives under warranty (while the warranty lasted); this did not negate the fact that I had to operate with a degraded RAID; until the hardware drivers were able to rebuild with a spare drive. Unfortunately; I eventually experienced an almost simultaneous failure of two drives; where the second drive died during a RAID rebuild from the first drive failure. If not for the fact that I had most of my files backed up to a NAS, I would have been in serious trouble. I still had to spend over a week obtaining new drives (Samsung at that time); formatting a new RAID logical disk and restoring my original file structure as best as possible. While I continued to use existing Seagate drives for secondary storage; they all eventually died. THUS, my less than stellar response to finding out that my brand new $3500 RAID was full of economy level Seagate drives.
Also, as outlined in my first posting; I found it somewhat curious that Promise Technologies only “Officially” supports two 3TB Hard Drive models; the Seagate Barracuda and a Consumer Level Drive from Toshiba. Why would this system not support Enterprise or Server series drives? Is there an inherent design flaw that prevents the Pegasus2 from working with more reliable drives? Was this a deliberate decision to not evaluate or simply not officially support such drives as an excuse for why the Pegasus2 RAID systems used the far less expensive drives? If some other reason; I and I am sure other users / potential customers would like to know the answer.
Regarding the warranty registration issue; Victor pointed out that I simply needed to supply my purchase receipt. The problem here is that the less-than-stellar Tech Support that “assisted” me wasn’t quite so open about getting my Warranty Period correct. I was informed that if I had a problem during the 2 1/2 month window between when Promise had assigned my warranty expiration date and the actual 2-year period from when the drive was shipped; I could submit a copy of my invoice at that time. I mentioned the fact that there were obvious chances of misplacing the original receipt over the next two years and that I preferred to get the warranty coverage date corrected now. I offered to send a copy of my receipt to him immediately; but he was very resistant to cooperating with such a solution. The best I could do was get him to admit that I could attach / upload a copy of the receipt with my existing support case file and that Promise “might” get the date corrected now; rather than in the future.
Based upon excuses as to why Promise can not do X or Y; rather than positive signs of taking care of customers and taking end-user experience into consideration; I am far from thrilled with my original decision to purchase my Pegasus2 system. For now, it is likely that I will end up sacrificing 3TB of storage capacity in order to reconfigure the RAID for Dual Drive Redundancy / Protection. Without physical drives that do not fill me with fear of disk-failure; I’ll always feel uncomfortable about fully trusting this RAID with my Data. If I did not have a Time Machine backup to a Drobo 5D; with additional files archived on a NAS and other backup drives, I’d probably dump the Pegasus2 immediately.
Again, these are my personal opinions based upon individual experience; but based upon other posts, it seems that I am not alone. I would truly like to see some PROACTIVE moves by Promise to address these concerns for current and future customers. (Then again; considering the 2.2 out of 5 rating of Promise Technology by its own employees via glassdoor.com, I wonder if anyone there has any motivation remaining.) … is it an omen that my Captcha to submit this comment is “ROT”?
Hi,
I just tried to view my ‘case’ on the Promise website. To see if it has been updated by the Promise-staff.
Still i wonder how it is possible that the site generated a warranty-date till march 2013 while i bought it the 12th of February 2014 but hey, not all hard disc companies are website-builders. I can’t edit the date at all while i wonder if the Promise Pegasus 2 was even available in march 2013.
Unfortunately it was impossible to view my case on my iPad but hey, not all hard disc companies have arrived in 2014 yet.
Changed my operating system from Linux to Max OSX, saved the changes, did it again, saved the changes… again… again… Somehow i am branded as a Linux-user till i lie in my grave. Reminds me of the warranty-date that will probably be there till the end of days.
No updates in my case yet. I have uploaded the invoice from the store in case they feel compelled to ‘update’ my warranty-date !
Am i getting cynical ? I hope not !
Cheers,
Michiel
Hi Larry,
Your review was inteded to generate more sales for Promise, as it did because your review made me take the gamble and buy one. Unfortunately i must use the word ‘gamble’ because it did not feel right after all the negative news about the Promise Pegasus series 1.
Indeed it was DOA and after a couple of days with numerous emails and explanations i was called today by Promise to ask me what was going on. They did not have a clue after all those emails and registration-fuss !
Fair is fair. Future Promise-customers have the right to know what they are buying into.
I have personally returned it today to their warehouse.
Personally i won’t take the gamble with Promise again. But all the best to those who do and good luck !
Cheers,
Michiel
Michiel:
I’m truly sorry you’ve had a bad experience with Promise and I appreciate your sharing your thoughts with the rest of us.
I just want to clarify one thing – my reviews are designed to help readers better understand a potential product before they buy it. For me, generating sales is not important because I don’t work for, nor am I compensated by any of the companies who’s products I review.
This is why I am grateful to you and many other readers for sharing their questions and experience. Our industry changes on a daily basis, no one can know all of it. However, together we can all help each other learn more.
Thanks,
Larry
Michiel
Regarding the warranty derived from the serial number you provided. I see now whats going on. Seems you provided the controller SN# which is not the correct serial number. Please provide the support rep the chassis serial number on the back of the unit.. He will unregister and register the correct serial number. This explains why the CRM is pulling
incorrect warranty information.
Makes sense now. As stated previously we will also honor the invoice date. Please append a copy of the invoice to your case.
Thanks
Victor Pacheco
Hi everyone! I’m about to buy between two options, and I’m all ears to know what do you think of it!!!
1- Pegasus R4 Thunderbolt 2 with 4 Seagate Barracuda 3TB or…
2- LaCie 10TB 5big Thunderbolt.
Which option do you think is better? I’m a video editor, HD 1080p maximum. I hope someday I can edit 4K, but most of my clients work with 720p and 1080p.
Thanks for your answers!!!
Bye!!!!
Hi Agustine,
I would wait for the LaCie 5Big with Thunderbolt 2. It will be announced this autumn. That is what i will do.
If you go for the Pegasus, buy it at the Apple Online Store. If something is wrong with it you are covered and you’ll have a replacement or your money back within 5 days. I am still waiting for my money and i am sure they’ll use the whole 30 days to do so.
Good luck !
Michiel
Thank you Michiel, I will look forward the LaCie 5Big Thunderbolt 2.
Best wishes!
Agustin.