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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Pegasus 2 Now Shipping... will there be a major improvement?

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Justin Quinn

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Promise Pegauss 2 is now shipping with TB2... I heard mixed reviews about the Pegasus 1 due to the raid controller, if I remember well.

Wanted to know if anyone has any inside info on the internals in the new iteration and what are your thoughts...

To be more specific, will it be possible to saturate the TB2 port with enough disks? What sir tot Read/Write rates should we expect?
 
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No inside info, just that I've owned one for 2years now, had one drive start to fail of a 4 drive RAID 5, and support walked me thru the replacement. It wasn't difficult but did require some specific steps that were different than a youtube video I was referencing for help. Other than that i've been happy with the performance/reliability (>500MB read/write) of the unit and plan on getting the new version soon.
 
The Pegasus is a nice RAID. In terms of performance, it's the best self-contained Thunderbolt RAID on the market. I would've liked it to be more rugged for use on a cart or in a more intensive environment. Although, I've owned two of them for some time. Also had one drive out of two 6-drive units fail. Simple swap and re-build. Just as reliable as any other pro RAID system I've assembled or purchased. I'm looking forward to these new models. Will get one to go with my Mac Pro that I'll probably be ordering in the next week or so.
 
Heh, I actually *did* use the Pegasus R4 on a cart for a feature I just worked on. 34 days, more than 25 different locations, had to swap the drives in the array 3 times (because we had more data than any one array could hold. Thus, RAID fills up, new drives get swapped in). Never had a failure. Never had a complaint. Well. It's a bit large. I wish it was juuuuust a little smaller so that I could fit in in a Pelican 1510. It's just a little too wide.

But performance wise, that thing was a beast, and solid through a hectic 34 days of shooting outdoors, indoors, through a few power outages and random other mistreatments.
 
I completely agree; I've been using my Pegasus R6 12TB almost every day since I bought it in January 2012. It's a solid workhorse, and if you use it as a primary workspace for projects (rather than long term storage or archiving), it will make you very happy. What I mean is that just like any RAID system, the more free space you keep on the volume, the faster it will perform. Keep it tidy and you'll fly through edits & VFX work.

I can only imagine what joys the Pegasus 2 will bring.

I'm just guessing that in order to really push beyond the limits of even Thunderbolt1 into Thunderbolt2 territory, you'll need to load it up with top of the line SSDs. Rest assured, if you don't want to invest that much up front, the stock hard drives are plenty fast.

This is by far my favorite direct-attached external storage system that I've ever owned.
 
We have several at work they are all solid except one had a controller issue, Promise swapped out the chassis no issues and all has been well since. Not really sure what performance gain will be seen on the 4 and 6 drive versions as once you factor in controller and drive speeds seems we are well inside of TB (ver1) specs... Should be interesting thought and the 8 drive version is exciting!
 
Burke Doeren said:
I'm just guessing that in order to really push beyond the limits of even Thunderbolt1 into Thunderbolt2 territory, you'll need to load it up with top of the line SSDs. Rest assured, if you don't want to invest that much up front, the stock hard drives are plenty fast.
Click to expand...

There are issues with using SSDs in a RAID array (have a read through this thread: http://reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?105831-SSD-RAIDS ). Also, always take a look at a manufacturers list of approved drives before swapping new drives into the array. I learned that the hard way on a Synology RAID. Love the product, don't get me wrong; but I used drives that weren't on the list and the drives lights just didn't even turn on. The software didn't tell me "Hey, yeah, you can't use those drives." It was just blank. Like it there were no drives there. Like I was trying to make it write on ghost drives.

There are only about 10 drive models approved for use in the Pegasus units. There were closer to 100 approved for the Synology. But I thought I could save some money and ended up not saving money . . .

Also, do note that with the wider bandwidth of Thunderbolt 2, even if it's not needed for the Pegasus unit itself, it will help when daisy-chaining a few devices together.
 
The 8-drive model should benefit from Thunderbolt 2. My current Pegasus R6 RAIDs, the 6x3TB unit in particular, can just about fill the 10Gbps Thunderbolt v1 bandwidth on reads.
 
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Another vote for the Pegasus....my r6 has been running more or less non stop for about a year now....not a single issue....and great reliable speed on top of it....my next raid will be another Pegasus for sure....
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
The 8-drive model should benefit from Thunderbolt 2. My current Pegasus R6 RAIDs, the 6x3TB unit in particular, can just about fill the 10Gbps Thunderbolt v1 bandwidth on reads.
Click to expand...

If we were to use thunderbolt 1 drives on the new MacPro does limit the speed to other thunderbolt devices? i.e. say you had a TB2 and a TB1 daisy chained.
 
TB speeds will be to the slowest on the chain - but remember that the new Mac Pro has 6 TB2 channels to work with - so keep all the TB1 on on channel (don't mix)
 
Michael Hastings said:
If we were to use thunderbolt 1 drives on the new MacPro does limit the speed to other thunderbolt devices? i.e. say you had a TB2 and a TB1 daisy chained.
Click to expand...

Yes, keep your TB1 devices on different ports than TB2 devices. TB1 operates as two separate 10Gbps channels and each device can link on to one of those channels, not both. TB2 shares all 20Gbps, so if devices do need to take more than 10Gbps, they can. If you connect a TB1 device onto a TB2 chain of devices, everything "dumbs down" to TB1 mode.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
Yes, keep your TB1 devices on different ports than TB2 devices. TB1 operates as two separate 10Gbps channels and each device can link on to one of those channels, not both. TB2 shares all 20Gbps, so if devices do need to take more than 10Gbps, they can. If you connect a TB1 device onto a TB2 chain of devices, everything "dumbs down" to TB1 mode.
Click to expand...


Hi Jeff,

Doesn't the Pegasus2 require a TB2 daisy chain? Also, could you please proffer a (your likely) Mac Pro (upcoming) configuration, if attaching the Peg2 24 Tb solution? Tis, of course, with the idea of putting all video and audio files on the PEG2 and the upgradeability of the Pro's drives.

Thank you very much

Fury
 
As per the spec, Pegasus 2 and other TB2 devices are backward compatible. Yes, you will get the best performance with it connected to a TB2 port and only pair it up with other TB2 devices, if you must chain devices on that port at all.

New Mac Pro configurations are still somewhat speculative, but I've had several people asking me lately. I would actually think that if Apple offered a 3GHz 10-Core (EV-2690 V2 CPU), I would go that route, but it doesn't seem to be in the cards. I think the 12-core is going to be too costly for most people and 12 cores / 24 threads is reaching beyond the scope of most any current apps out there. Other than 3D rendering or highly nodalized processes. So based on that, I'm leaning toward a faster-clocked 8-core unit. But I'll have to see what the options are once Apple presents them. Based on what I know today, I would be ordering a 3.2GHz 8-core with 64GB RAM and 1TB PCIe Flash storage. Dual D700 6GB GPUs. I would seriously consider the 12-core if I spent much or most of my time in Resolve or rendering with Maya, Modo, etc.. and if it isn't too overly expensive. Rendering is a difficult argument to make in this situation as I can always build 1U dual Xeon boxes for barely anymore than the cost of the CPUs these days if that's the sort of power I need.

To me, it seems with the way software is headed right now and current pricing and CPU clock rates factored in, I think most of us will do better by spending the money on the nicer GPUs, max RAM and a faster-clocked 8-core CPU. Where I get the RAM from will depend on price and availability. If Apple's price is close to reasonable, I'll just add it to the configuration, otherwise I'll look elsewhere. OWC will have RAM, but may not have it right at the system launch. 64GB is going to be the limit for now until someone starts shipping 32GB 1866MHz RDIMMs. Micron, Samsung and Hynix all have them on their maps, but they're not here yet. And if they're anything like the current crop of 32GB 1600MHz RDIMMs, we won't want them due to the additional latency that comes with.
 
"I'm leaning toward a faster-clocked 8-core unit."

If we scale the max performance 12-core down in terms of the 8-core speed - it's behaves like a 10.6-core chip.
(32% faster).

The 12-core running with 9 cores (18 threads) fully saturated is Slower than the 8 core.

The 8-core starts 11% faster than the 12-core with 1 core saturated
The 8-core reaches 13% faster than the 12-core by the time all 8 cores are saturated

If the heavy lifting is to carried out by sending data to the GPUs ... I am Guessing that the 8-core will be 10%+ faster for most loads, until Open CL 2.0 makes it to the New Mac Pro in (Guess) Nov 2014 (when the GPUs will be allowed to directly access main memory)

I am beginning to think that money saved on the 8-core configuration could be put towards buying 128 GB of low latency memory when this eventually hits the streets.

(Also, Now that Pegasus has finally released their TB2 solution ... it must be time for Apple to tell us how expensive this Xmas is going to be!)

AJ
 
Not sure this is the right thread for this, but we're definitely in for a new Mac Pro per Jeff's suggested config tho might limp along with 32gb ram to save a few $ till new ram is available. We intend to edit & render Dragon footage in PP & color in Devinci. We currently use esata chassis & CalDigit card w/4 discreet ports (never raid bound but wondering if software raid would be fast enough) & hoped to continue using this either w/ TB>esata adapters or a PCI chassis or do we need a new raid / card solution?. Is the G-Technology 2TB Gdock ev Thunderbolt remotely worth considering? Might get a RR-X. We have a BMD DL extreme card but might need to bump that up. Would get a GPU card if not for TB2 limit.

Trying to to put together the most bang for buck system that includes:

drive solution
color accurate grading display panel (Ezio? How trustworthy is apples high end display as we have one)
control surface (TW elements? Avid MC?)

We are quite serious about doing great work but don't have stupid money to throw around ;). Jeff...super interested in your wisdom....thx all. Quite an exciting month!
 
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