Promise Pegasus R6 & Mac Thunderbolt Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 8, 2011 2:01 AM ESTThe Pegasus: Quirks
I did encounter occasional glitches with the Promise Utility. No show stoppers, but annoying nonetheless. Sometimes when deleting a logical drive I'd get an error telling me that the delete operation failed (even though it didn't):
Refreshing the logical drive page revealed that the drive had been deleted, despite the warning.
Sometimes various fields will be populated with not a number (NaN) instead of the actual data itself. Just as before, refreshing the page in question usually cleared the problem:
The Pegasus itself was most problematic when operating at or near its capacity. In one case I tried filled a 10TB RAID-5 array with 10TB of data. Rather than copy a bunch of large files over and over again, I used Iometer to generate a single 10TB file on the drive. Somewhere around the 9TB marker Iometer stopped writing to the drive. Mac OS X reported a single 10TB file on disk but the actual file was under 9TB in size leaving over 1TB of free space on the drive. I force quit Iometer and tried writing to the drive manually. At this point the drive became incredibly slow to respond. I tried canceling the copy but Finder crashed under OS X. The Pegasus itself actually hung and refused to power down, I had to pull the plug on the device in order for it to power cycle. When I plugged it back in the R6 wouldn't appear under OS X. I had to pull two drives to break the RAID-5 array then delete/recreate the array to get it working again. Of course I lost all of the data I wrote to the drive, thankfully it was just a bunch of repeating bytes created by Iometer. I attempted the same thing again (twice) and couldn't duplicate the issue. I'm going to assume this was an Iometer related issue (or a problem with creating a single ~9TB file on the array), but it's worth disclosing regardless.
The only other time I had an array go bad was when I swapped in four SandForce SSDs and created a giant RAID-0 array. One of the drives simply dropped out of the array, forcing me to delete and recreate the array. As I mentioned earlier, I can't be entirely sure if this is a Promise issue, SandForce issue or a little of both. I never had a drive mysteriously disappear when using the Hitachi drives that came with the Pegasus however.
Other than the issues I've mentioned here, I didn't encounter any problems during my testing of the Pegasus R6.
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Spazweasel - Friday, July 8, 2011 - link
$50 too much for a cable? Psshh. Children these days don't remember $75-100 SCSI-3 and UltraSCSI cables. These things are expensive for good reason.You want the highest performance, you pay to play. That's always been the case.
tzhu07 - Friday, July 8, 2011 - link
The phrase, "you get what you pay for" is generally true as a rule of thumb, but in the computer and consumer electronics industry, that has for the most part been untrue.Case in point: The high price of Monster cables having no performance advantage over the same type of cables one can find on newegg at a much lower price.
Apple just has this technology cornered....for now.
tzhu07 - Friday, July 8, 2011 - link
Well, I should say untrue in the computer and consumer electronics cable market.darwinosx - Friday, July 8, 2011 - link
The technology is Intel's not Apples. Intel determines the licensing fees.Samus - Friday, July 8, 2011 - link
Yes, but like SCSI, Apple was its only mainstream delivery vehicle. Back in the 80's and 90's, SCSI interfaces were reserved for servers, ultra high end workstations, and Apple computers. They always push the bleeding edge, which is possibly the only thing I respect about Apple.Justin Case - Saturday, July 9, 2011 - link
This has nothing to do with "pushing the bleeding edge". This has to do with giving Apple an "excuse" to remove USB ports from their iToys, thus locking out 3rd party accessory manufacturers (Thunderbolt is far too expensive to be competitive, unless you have a special deal like Apple has with Intel).The Mac hasn't been Apple's main focus for a long time; it's all about iOS and its ecosystem, now.
haley2011 - Sunday, July 10, 2011 - link
okMySchizoBuddy - Sunday, July 10, 2011 - link
doesn't the article specifically say that thunderbolt is free to license.Isn't Promise Pegasus a 3rd part manufacturer. Do you have any source claiming that Promise has a special deal with Apple.
Sony has thunderbolt ports in it's laptop as well.
Focher - Sunday, July 10, 2011 - link
Besides that you give away your bias of anything from Apple, TB isn't an Apple technology. It's an Intel one. What I find ironic is the USB versus TB arguments. First, it's a false choice. Even Apple has offered both FireWire and USB ports for years on their machines. It's only recently that FireWire has started to be removed from models. There's no current indication that USB will be dropped by Apple. Second, in specific regards to USB 3.0 I don't see the argument versus TB device availability. Neither have much market penetration yet, so only time will tell how each of them will do - and both could do fine or both could fail.MobiusStrip - Tuesday, July 12, 2011 - link
iOS devices are toys, but they already lack USB ports. They don't have any proper developer- or user-accessible I/O, so you think Apple's going to put Thunderbolt ports on them?NO. Apple has created a whole line of mobile devices that are ironically isolated from the world around them.