Promise Pegasus drives

[Rainer Wirth]

Bob,

with your picture above and your magic words behind you,
you are the first and truly magician in the holy world of Array and Raid systems.
Take it with humor,
you are right.

cheers

Rainer

At the moment I’m watching “The Legend of the seeker”, forgive me.

factstory
Rainer Wirth
phone_0049-177-2156086
Mac pro 8core
Adobe,FCP,Avid
several raid systems

[Ron Amborn]

Good question Ron
Only if they want them to support your system. And for those who don’t need support well good luck.

Sincerely,
Ron Amborn President
Maxx Entertainment Digital
21562 Newland Street
Huntington Beach , Ca 92646
Direct 714-374-4944
Cell 714-713-4492 Fax 714-374-3404
ron@maxxdigital.com
http://www.maxxdigital.com

[Joe Engledow]

Hi Neil,

You can access the make and model of the hard drives in your Promise Pegasus R-Series with no need to unplug the physical drive. Just run the “Promise Utility” client app on your Thunderbolt Mac.

As well, from within Promise Utility, you can read the Event Log and generate a Service Report, which a Promise Technical Support person would be happy to review with you.

We regularly test the hard drives which are on the market and publish updates to the Hardware Compatibility List, which Promise and Apple work together on, to bring you the fastest Thunderbolt RAID experience for video editing. The current list is here on Promise.com’s Download Center:

https://promise.com/support/download_file.aspx?rsn=1287&m=205&region=en-US

Any one of these hard drives will work in the Promise Pegasus. Use of drives which are not listed is experimental, and may not work.

Please make an account on our technical support web site, https://support.promise.com. From there you can make support requests on the record under specific serial numbers and we can establish a case history for warranty replacement of the drives.

Joe Engledow, Technical Support
Promise Technology US, https://support.promise.com
+1 (408) 228-1500

[Neil Sadwelkar]

Joe,

Thanks for your help. I unseated the drive basically to just reseat it in case that helped. That’s when I noticed it was a Seagate as I’m used to seeing Hitachi in the Promise Utility.

From your link on qualified drives it looks like these desktop drives (as in non-enterprise drives) have been tested and qualify for the Pegasus. Which is fine, as long as they work fine.

We noticed the drive failure on our unit on the 31st May. Being a weekend, we received a response from the Promise rep in India only on 3rd Jun when they sent us a link to register and report the failure. We’ve done that on the 4th or 5th June I think. And now we are awaiting a replacement.

Hope to have this sorted over the next week. And I hope there are replacement drives in my country and they don’t have to be shipped from overseas.

———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Paul King]

This is one long thread full of people who do not have the full story when it comes to enterprise vs desktop.

Most unreliable enterprise drive – Seagate SCSI. Had our greatest percentage of failures with Cheetahs both 10k and 15k.
Back then there was a clear difference between enterprise and desktop – SCSI vs PATA.

Along comes SATA with a better connection than PATA and much better capacity and potential than SCSI.

Controller manufacturers adopted unified controllers early (SAS/SATA) and back then (2005) none of them had an issue with desktop drives for RAID. David is right, most workstation storage box vendors used desktop drives and most were Hitachi.

Back then reliability was more an issue of where you bought the drives than what model or brand they were. We bought all our drives through Synnex and we had a 25% failure rate, regardless of brand. They mistreated the drives in transit (a WD rep who witnessed this told me).
We switched to different supplies and the failure rates dropped to 1%.

Around 2005 we used desktop drives in RAIDs, most predominantly WD. At the demise of SCSI and after the rise of SAS, the drive venders brought out enterprise variants with SATA interfaces. AT that time they started to BS about enterprise drives. WD took it one step further and crippled their Black series to stop people using them in RAIDs. Adaptec had 2TB FAUX Blacks on their compatibility list, I bought 24 of them, had issues and so Adaptec took them off their compatibility list. WD could have fixed them but sighted that they were desktop and not suitable for RAID. I hacked their firmware and made them work anyway, but never bought another WD drive again.

We switched to Hitachi. Bob – the desktop drives 7kx000 were rated for 24/7 use not 8/5. That’s why we went that way, and they worked fine until WD finished them off.

So why do we have enterprise drives? Greed. Same reason Avid sold Newscutter for $1000 more than Media Composer – “they’re broadcasters so they will pay more for it”, direct quote from Avid.

Everyone here that has advocated enterprise drives – go to every vendors compatibility list and have a look at how many desktop drives appear. Most of them are early models (2005-2008) but Adaptec and LSI have current desktop drives on their lists. They preface this by saying they recommend enterprise though.

Vibration? A current desktop drive would have less operational vibration than an enterprise drive from 3 years ago.

WD Red – what a crock of s… Only up to 5 bay NAS – what BS and WD here in Australia contradicted this during their sales tour.

Only fundamental difference is TLER (WD term) and this is a real issue. However from 500 Hitachi drives in RAID 5 we have only had 3 drop out from a TLER event. Solution? Put them back in and let the RAID rebuild. However if I use desktop drives now (Seagate Barracuda is the only model left) then I set them up as RAID 6.
How many guys here have had to rebuild a 60TB RAID5? It’s a nervous wait whether it’s desktop or enterprise so RAID6 is the way to go.

To sum up, enterprise is a crock and motivated by greed. The physical drives are likely the same (albeit the enterprise probably test better out the factory) with only the firmware difference. It’s an excuse for making money and probably a sound corporate strategy with so much storage going cloud based.

So if you’re on Mac it’s Areca (they are basically LSI controllers with a Mac driver) and Constellations. If you’re on a PC I’d do Adaptec 7 and Barracudas. My most recent RAID is Adaptec 7 with 16 Barracudas in RAID6. 2100MB/sec from desktop drives seems good enough for a workstation. Beyond this I wouldn’t bother with mechanical HDD. Adaptec 7 with SSd is good for 6GB/sec.

So everyone here has been correct in part, but there is still a lot of misinformation which only strengthens the HDD vendors bottom line.

[Alex Gerulaitis]

Paul,

I don’t think anybody disputed that “enterprise” drives are desktops drives that passed the enterprise exam: better tolerances, less vibration, longer warranty, different firmware. They may all come from the same batch; those that pass certain tests, get the “enterprise” label.

Some enterprise drives though just don’t exist in desktop versions – SAS SFF ones: full duplex, longer I/O queues, and really expensive. (Love those, wish there were desktop versions.)

The real question is, does the enterprise label offer tangible benefits for the price? I think it does for some, and does not for others. I am not sure it’s all about greed though.

[Bob Zelin]

Paul writes –
How many guys here have had to rebuild a 60TB RAID5? It’s a nervous wait whether it’s desktop or enterprise so RAID6 is the way to go.

REPLY –
why, that would be me. And I have been in unfortunately several situations in 2012, where I had catastrophic failure from RAID 5’s that did not rebuild (while using my trusty Hitachi Enterprise drives). And I too have seen these drives “fail” due to time out errors, only to find out that there was really nothing wrong with the drives. So I too, do RAID 6 these days, unless the client wildly objects.

With that said, I don’t care what the facts are. All I know is that I deal with the same vendors of host adaptor cards that you do. And these vendors state USE BRAND XXXX DRIVES. And if I don’t follow their instructions, and I get catastrophic failures (which I have had in the past multiple times), these same vendors basically say “you idiot – we TOLD YOU to use the enterprise drives”. And since I know exactly who ProMax uses for host adaptor cards (I use the same people) I know very well that they potentially face the exact same situation that I do, with catastrophic failure. And I don’t need to have my client looking at me in one direction (what an idiot we hired), and from the other direction having the host adaptor company looking at me saying “we told you so – you idiot”.

I was in this exact situation about 3 years ago, where I DARED to use non enterprise drives in a 16 bay array RAID 5, the client had catastrophic failure, and after calling me, they called the host adaptor company (one of the ones you mentioned in your post), and they told them that “Bob Zelin” used the WRONG drives in the drive array, so of course, they lost all their data. This is what you face in real life. As Alex said – they are all the same drives, on the same assembly line, and the enterprise ones pass “bad block” tests. But they fail too. SO Paul, when YOU lose all your data one day, are you going to tell your boss “eeh, it’s all the same crap”, when the manufacturers of the components that you used tell him that you are an idiot ? You tell me.

Bob Zelin

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
maxavid@cfl.rr.com

[Paul King]

Bob

I haven’t lost any data.
Using desktop drives doesn’t make a difference to overall data integrity, just TLER susceptibility.

Was it Areca? Tell me if it was.

There are other reasons for RAIDs failing than drives themselves, but it’s easy to blame the drives rather than the controller.

But Bob, if they say “DONT USE THEM AT ALL” why do they test them and approve them for use? Why are desktop drives on their compatibility list?

WD introduced head parking into their Black drives when idle for 12.7 seconds and claimed it was an environmental feature. This stopped them from being used in RAIDs but also made them terrible drives for desktop use. Yes they were the fastest desktop series, but they took 1.5 seconds to unpark the heads and had a head parking limit of 300,000 times over their life cycle. That’s the kind of BS they went to, to stop desktop drives being used in RAIDs. No other vendor had head parking so why did WD introduce it in a performance line?

Again the only technical issue is TLER. If you’re RAID6 then it’s mostly mitigated.

Please Bob, you have every right to mention who’s controller you had catastrophic failures with. I might have answers for you that could get you out of trouble next time. Because if it’s a controller issue then there will be a next time. Lets face it, the controller vendor hung you out to dry when the customer called them.

[Ron Amborn]

Paul
This is not a technical debate on what works. I think you have great knowledge of hard drives.However, If the manufacture says to use a certain model drive with RAID then you have two choices. Either you follow instructions or you do not follow instructions. All the technical mubo jumbo will not change the fact that if Hithaci ( HGST),Wd, Seagate says “they do not support any RAID that is built with desktop drives” then that is their rule.

So the next time you are pulled over for speeding try and give the cop some technical reason for going over the speed limit and see what he says.Rules are Rules like them or not.

Sincerely,
Ron Amborn President
Maxx Entertainment Digital
21562 Newland Street
Huntington Beach , Ca 92646
Direct 714-374-4944
Cell 714-713-4492 Fax 714-374-3404
ron@maxxdigital.com
http://www.maxxdigital.com

[Alex Gerulaitis]

[Paul King] “Using desktop drives doesn’t make a difference to overall data integrity, just TLER susceptibility.”

Just differences in MTBF and URE numbers alone make enterprise drives two to 100 times more reliable than desktop ones. It’s another matter whether (a) you can believe published numbers, (b) it justifies the cost difference if you do.