anyone try runing 3 or 4tb drives in a promise r6 yet?

[Brian Merlen]

so before i pry one open and replace all the drives needlessly i was trying to see had any of my fellow redusers tried this yet?....would love it if i could throw 6 4tb drives in one....

basically id like to have one huge raid with a small foot print running with a new mbp for mobility purposes. so i want 20tb's or more using thunderbolt or usb3 without needing to stipe drives with TB (unless i have to).... that's the goal at least. i want this to comfortably fit in a backpack....so i cant get a huge server, i want something mobile as heck....


thanks for your thoughts...

[Jarek Zabczynski]

I've heard people having issues doing this. While some managed to get it to work, according to Promise it only supports up to 2TB drives. My guess is a firmware issue. Personally, I wouldn't try it until Promise officially supports larger drives.

[Brian Merlen]

any usb 3/thunderbolt options for 24tb+ that are small? i dont care what brand just mobility is key

[Harrison Diamond]

I don't know what issues others have but I'm using an R6 with Hitachi 7K3000 3TB and 7K4000 4TB drives in RAID 1E and RAID 5 respectively. The R6 comes with Hitachi 7K1000.C or 7K3000 drives from Promise so I'm guessing any issues may be related to using non-Hitachi drives?

[Brian Merlen]

Thanks for the 411 Harrison, looking forward to voiding my warranty and trying this myself! I wish they'd just sell me an empty bay...Weren't they supposed to come to market with an empty enclosure at some point?

[Kwan Khan]

any usb 3/thunderbolt options for 24tb+ that are small? i dont care what brand just mobility is key

@ Brain, Your Solution
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/hard-..._USB3_eSATA_1U

Video;
http://www.youtube.com/embed/GU8DsSs...de=transparent

[Brian Merlen]

Yeah I took a look at that one, its nice, but I wish it had a couple more bays...i'd like to have at least 24tb's for mobile use if I could...

[Harrison Diamond]

Can't imagine it voiding the warranty...just hold on to the old drives just in case. There's nothing stopping you from using different drives. No warranty stickers. Standard type of sliding trays.

[Brian Merlen]

Technically according to their legal jargon I am not allowed to open it up (the R6). If a drive fails they seriously want you to send the raid in instead of replacing it yourself... I was on the phone with their IT department talking about the situation with them. They didn't recommend I try this. Apple agrees I shouldn't do this too...

but to hell with them all, right lol?

[Jeff Kilgroe]

According to the Promise guys at NAB '11, NAB '12 and in the original Pegasus Thunderbolt press release, they were also going to sell the units without drives so people could add their own. That has yet to happen.

I have an R6 12TB and it's been great, but haven't had a need to open it. I personally don't feel it's rugged enough for mobile or field use, but the current selection of Thunderbolt storage out there is really lacking. At NAB, G-Tech said they were going to have a Thunderbolt version of their G-Speed ES Pro, but it has yet to materialize, even in official announcement form. All they have done is announce the smaller units with 2 drives in them. And they're way overpriced, IMO.

If you already have an R6 and it's working fine, before pulling drives to swap, why not just buy another and chain the two together? Most of your bigger / better RAID manufacturers are not offering 3TB drives. The performance suffers in light of the additional platters and heads to get the capacity up. 4TB drives are even worse in that way and no one is shipping a "RAID" or "enterprise" class 4TB yet. Initial reliability reports for the 4TB units, regardless of manufacturer, have been pretty dismal... I wouldn't want them right now myself...