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

[Andrew clemson]

For what its worth I pulled the factory drives out of one of my R4s when they crashed and replace them with 3TB seagate barracudas.

Worked fine for a while, but then I had an instance where promise utility said all was well, but I got a "The disk you inserted is not readable" message upon boot.

Reformat and initialise twice and all is well again. Have lost faith in it being a super safe storage of data.

Im planning to move back to Sata storage via either the Lacie or ATTO.

[Meryem Ersoz]

You buy a RAID 5 drive to secure your storage and then try to muck with the drive parameters, with the possibility of failure? That doesn't make sense to me. But I'm admittedly paranoid about data. Seems sensible to buy two of these and chain em up. I'd like to see more, better Thunderbolt storage options, too, but I definitely don't want to take chances with the data along the way.

[Paul Ellington]

I love Promise but this is what their price was until they go greedy...

This was for the 12TB version ...

[Andrew clemson]

You buy a RAID 5 drive to secure your storage and then try to muck with the drive parameters, with the possibility of failure? That doesn't make sense to me. But I'm admittedly paranoid about data. Seems sensible to buy two of these and chain em up. I'd like to see more, better Thunderbolt storage options, too, but I definitely don't want to take chances with the data along the way.

Only reason I jumped from the standard 2TB drives was because I had a crash where the unit reported 2 of them to be "dead". Worth noting that I was running raid 5 at the time but seeing as 2 drives out of the 4 bays crashed at the same time, I'm taking the storage hit versus safety and running Raid 10.

[Neil W. Smith]

Yesterday, I took out the 4 x 2TB hard drives and replaced them with 4 x 512 GB SSD drives formatted with RAID 0 ... as soon as SSDs come down in price and go up in size this is the way to go ... testing with the AJA Disk Whack app I got Write speed of 574 MB/s and Read speed of 714 MB/s ... compared to 580 and 539 with the spinning disks.

Anyone tried 6 x SSDs in the 6bay Promise enclosure?

Neil

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Only reason I jumped from the standard 2TB drives was because I had a crash where the unit reported 2 of them to be "dead". Worth noting that I was running raid 5 at the time but seeing as 2 drives out of the 4 bays crashed at the same time, I'm taking the storage hit versus safety and running Raid 10.

That happens more often than not in these types of arrays. Sometimes it's a power irregularity or other fault with the unit that can damage multiple drives in the same incident. Or there are times when a drive may fail and create a power spike or something else of its own that can take an adjacent HDD out as well.

As always, maintain a reliable backup of some kind. Don't ever trust RAID-5 to be an adequate means of preserving your data. It's too bad that so many RAID solution providers market it as being such a thing.

[Andrew clemson]

Yeah Ive kind of lost faith in the units as a long term storage solution.

At least for me to use in the field. Same or similar problem as happened to the other guys I know locally working with them. Supposedly there is a terminal workaround which can force your drives back online, but wouldn't want to use that for anything other than recovery to a second drive really.

Really hoping that OWCs jupiter miniSAS will be what I'm looking for.

What would you say is the safest low cost portable system? Remember Im in and out of 4x4s and in the heat most of the time.... ;)

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Yeah Ive kind of lost faith in the units as a long term storage solution.

There isn't one single hard-drive or RAID type storage system that I would trust for long term storage or archival purposes. For field use, the Promise Pegasus are a non-starter, they are not built for it. They're made for the desktop and that's it. If they were going to be on a cart, I would at least want shock-mounted drives and PCBs. Very few systems have that sort of thing.... I end up building my own RAID boxes for that reason alone most of the time.

Supposedly there is a terminal workaround which can force your drives back online, but wouldn't want to use that for anything other than recovery to a second drive really.

Yes. And recovery is when you would want to use it. These units are pretty smart and when drives are locked out they usually have a good reason. Sometimes it can be caused by external issues, but you should test the drive fully outside the unit before putting it back and bringing it online.

Really hoping that OWCs jupiter miniSAS will be what I'm looking for.

I looked them over at NAB and I can't say that I saw anything about them to set them apart from 99% of the other RAID products on the market. For the most part, everything out there is using the same simplistic rack designs, same onboard host controllers from Symbios, ATTO or LSI... Most running an embedded Linux for a Javascript / HTTP (typically Apache) management interface. Some don't even have that. There really isn't a whole lot out there that jumps out as being unique. Which really surprises me because the market is so over-saturated with hundreds of companies all providing the same exact thing. Makes no sense, IMO. So many of these companies come and go. The ones that stick around are those who get directly sponsored or promoted, even partially owned, by the big hard drive companies and the ones who provide good enough advertising and customer service to keep people coming back. Maxx Digital is a good example of that. Their customer service is great.

What would you say is the safest low cost portable system? Remember Im in and out of 4x4s and in the heat most of the time.... ;)

I would look for something that's built to operate on 6 or 8 2.5" HDDs and install 512GB SSDs in there. I don't know what prices are like in Dubai or other areas you frequent, but the bigger/faster SSDs are dropping in price like crazy here lately. Or build your own... I'm dreaming up a solution along those lines as we speak. Haven't decided if I'm going to prototype it or not, but I'm thinking of building an SSD-based RAID system that fits in a Pelicase along with a REDMAG SSD reader and the whole thing connects via a single Thunderbolt cable. The big hang-up with it is power. But I think I have it worked out where it can power itself from common battery types and I'm liking the 20V lithium packs used by common power tools like the ones from Milwaukee and DeWalt. Rugged, cheap, available everywhere.

OTOH, if you're shooting all RED, as I am these days, I don't bother with offloading and transfers and all that in the field anymore. Just not worth the hassle, the extra equipment, etc.. I just carry around enough REDMAG SSDs to survive the journey and then offload when shooting is done for the day and I'm back at the office/studio or base camp or whatever. On that note, those 512GB REDMAGs can't get here soon enough! But I'll rock 7 x 256GB SSDs per EPIC for each day of shooting and that's usually more than enough unless I shoot lots of high speed. ...Which does happen as most of my corporate clients have figured out the whole 5K high-speed thing now and realize the advantages for pulling stills or retiming shots. Once again, where are those 512GB REDMAGs??? Arrrgh!

For that approach -- shoot all day, offload later, I still use a RED Station reader along with a Macbook Pro to spot-check footage or to check certain things here and there. But I trust the SSDs for storing the data more than I trust a field offload to other media. Anything I can do to NOT wipe media in the field is a blessing.

[Paul Ellington]

That happens more often than not in these types of arrays. Sometimes it's a power irregularity or other fault with the unit that can damage multiple drives in the same incident. Or there are times when a drive may fail and create a power spike or something else of its own that can take an adjacent HDD out as well.

As always, maintain a reliable backup of some kind. Don't ever trust RAID-5 to be an adequate means of preserving your data. It's too bad that so many RAID solution providers market it as being such a thing.

How about an honest opinion from you about their greediness... Why would they up the price when it should be lover by now?

[Jeff Kilgroe]

How about an honest opinion from you about their greediness... Why would they up the price when it should be lover by now?

Don't know what to say there, Paul... Thought I threw out my input earlier in this thread... All HDD makers and storage integrators are raping customers on pricing right now. Still using flooding that happened over a year ago as a weak-ass excuse. Yes, prices should be lower, but they're not. Prices are still high across the board, across the industry.

As for what happened to you, there really is no explanation other than the obvious... You got screwed. I've had vendors try and pull that sort of crap on me before... Sometimes I can talk to the right person and get them to honor their price, sometimes not. Sometimes I can tell them where to stick it and go somewhere else, other times I have to suck it up and buy it anyway. What they did was slimy and constitutes poor business practice and customer relations. If they invoiced you at a certain price and you paid that price, it became a binding sales contract the instant money was transferred. Technically they broke the law (here in the USA) if they came back and told you that it was going to cost more. But what are you going to do? I guess you could always have your lawyer send them a nasty letter, which costs you $$$ and they will probably shrug it off and still refuse to sell you the item at the original price. You could take them to court for $$$ and time... That's life... And greedy people, or those who are just assholes when it comes to money or dealing with their customers, are everywhere.