Does Promise Pegasus 1 R6 support 10TB HDDs?

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  • Last Post 01 July 2017
Riot Nrrrd posted this 01 July 2017

I have a Pegasus R6 with 6x2 TB Hitachi hard drives.  Recently I had to replace one drive.

I would like to have much more capacity in this unit than the 8 TB (RAID 6) configuration I have now.

Your Pegasus1 compatibility list does not list anything larger than a 4 TB drive.  :-(

It seems unfair that I can only double my current capacity, that I cannot buy these 10 TB drives to get 60 TB of raw capacity/40 TB RAID 6.  I have no need for Thunderbolt 2 or 3 speeds in my home setup.  The 4 TB drives in your Pegasus1 compatibility list are of limited availability these days.

How about certifying some more recent disks in your older products??

These units cost quite a bit of money, I do not feel like I should have to buy an entire new unit (that I cannot afford) just to get larger capacity disks.  (For example, there was an amazing sale on Hitachi 10 TB drives a few days ago that I could not take advantage of.)

If we absolutely cannot use 8 or 10 TB drives, the compatibility list for the Pegasus2 R6 lists the Toshiba MD04ACA600 6 TB drive.  Is that same drive likely to work fine in the Pegasus1 R6?  Even if it is too 'new' to be included in the Pegasus1 compatibility list?

Thanks in advance for your answer.

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Pradeep Chidambaranath posted this 01 July 2017

Hi Riot,

We are sorry to inform you that Pegasus 1 series has reached it end of life and there will not be any hardware update available for this unit. Kindly use the compatible drives to have a better preformance.

Regards

Pradeep C

 

Riot Nrrrd posted this 01 July 2017

Pradeep,

I am not asking for a hardware update.  I am asking whether drives newer/larger than 4 TB will work.  If you look at the 4 TB drives in your existing Pegasus 1 compatibility list, they are quite old and hard to find in New condition.  (And thus very pricey.)

By "hardware update" are you saying that the hardware (firmware) would have to be updated to work with newer/larger hard drives?

If instead I set all the drives in the unit to "PassThru", does that mean that a "hardware update" is not necessary and the unit will pass all SCSI commands straight through to the individual drives, so it would not matter if the drives were newer/larger than the ones in the "Pegasus 1 disk compatibility" list?

Pradeep Chidambaranath posted this 01 July 2017

 Hi,

Once the product is moved to the legacy list, then there will not be any testing done for higher capacity drives. We recommend you to use the compatible drives. If you would like to use higher capacity drives, then you can try it at your own risk.  Promise will not take responsibility for any performance issue or hardware failure caused by using non-compatible drives. We are sorry for the inconvenience caused to you.

Regards

Pradeep C

Riot Nrrrd posted this 01 July 2017

I'm willing to take the responsibility.

Can you please address my 2nd question, about what happens in PassThru mode?  In another thread from last year, a customer wrote:

"In this configuration we are discussing, the Pegasus will not use its hardware RAID capabilities and will behave like a Thunderbolt docking station for your drives. The drives will each have single drive transfer speeds and will not benefit from the increased speeds when reading from several drives at once or writing to several drives at once which RAID offers."

which sounds to me like there would be no "hardware update" necessary to use newer/larger disks in this mode.

I am aware that it probably sounds ridiculous to use a nice RAID unit like yours as a mere "Thunderbolt docking station" and not take advantage of the hardware RAID capabilities, but if it gets me 60 TB of raw space instead of only 24 TB ...

Raghuraman Kannan posted this 01 July 2017

Hi ,

Yes, you can use the drives in the passthru mode with out opting  for the RAID .

However, there is risk of data loss if the drive fails . We advise to have the backup of the data for such scenario.

Regarding the drive capacity , you can use any larger capacity drives as long the drive gets detected in the unit. Please be aware that using non-compatible or non tested drives in RAID Setup will have varied performance .

Please feel free to post any questions if you have any queries.

Thanks !

Riot Nrrrd posted this 01 July 2017

Raghuraman,

Yes I know about data loss.  I can configure a unit with 6 PassThru drives as a ZFS raidz2 zpool and avoid that problem.  (As a matter of fact, I have just done that to test it out.  See my next post below.  It seems to work just fine.)

So it sounds like you are saying that in PassThru mode, as long as the host (Mac mini in my case) detects the drive, the level of firmware in the Pegasus 1 R6 or what disk drives are in your compatibility list should not matter.  It should only matter if I want to use the unit as a traditional RAID unit using the RAID hardware in the Pegasus.  In which case trying any drives larger than 4 TB is a risk.

I have owned other, smaller, 2-disk RAID 1 units in the past.  Some of them were limited by their hardware to, say, 1.5 TB drives and no larger.  I was wanting to know if there was a similar size restriction in the Pegasus 1, or if this is just case where there were only 4 TB drives available at the time you EOL'ed the product - so no newer/larger drives would be certified for it.

If it is the former, then I know I have a disk size restriction I cannot get around.  If it is the latter, then there is a chance larger/newer drives would work - but you will not guarantee it.  Is that an accurate assessment?

Riot Nrrrd posted this 01 July 2017

Riot-Nrrrds-Mac-mini:Downloads admin$ sudo zpool create -m /Volumes/Media mediapool raidz2 /dev/disk2 /dev/disk3 /dev/disk4 /dev/disk5 /dev/disk6 /dev/disk7

 Riot-Nrrrds-Mac-mini:Downloads admin$ zpool status

  pool: mediapool

 state: ONLINE

  scan: none requested

config:

NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM

mediapool   ONLINE       0     0     0

  raidz2-0  ONLINE       0     0     0

    disk2   ONLINE       0     0     0

    disk3   ONLINE       0     0     0

    disk4   ONLINE       0     0     0

    disk5   ONLINE       0     0     0

    disk6   ONLINE       0     0     0

    disk7   ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

Riot-Nrrrds-Mac-mini:Downloads admin$ zfs list

NAME        USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT

mediapool  1.06M  7.02T   989K  /Volumes/Media

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