Promise Pegasus R6 & Mac Thunderbolt Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 8, 2011 2:01 AM ESTThe Pegasus: Quirks
I did encounter occasional glitches with the Promise Utility. No show stoppers, but annoying nonetheless. Sometimes when deleting a logical drive I'd get an error telling me that the delete operation failed (even though it didn't):
Refreshing the logical drive page revealed that the drive had been deleted, despite the warning.
Sometimes various fields will be populated with not a number (NaN) instead of the actual data itself. Just as before, refreshing the page in question usually cleared the problem:
The Pegasus itself was most problematic when operating at or near its capacity. In one case I tried filled a 10TB RAID-5 array with 10TB of data. Rather than copy a bunch of large files over and over again, I used Iometer to generate a single 10TB file on the drive. Somewhere around the 9TB marker Iometer stopped writing to the drive. Mac OS X reported a single 10TB file on disk but the actual file was under 9TB in size leaving over 1TB of free space on the drive. I force quit Iometer and tried writing to the drive manually. At this point the drive became incredibly slow to respond. I tried canceling the copy but Finder crashed under OS X. The Pegasus itself actually hung and refused to power down, I had to pull the plug on the device in order for it to power cycle. When I plugged it back in the R6 wouldn't appear under OS X. I had to pull two drives to break the RAID-5 array then delete/recreate the array to get it working again. Of course I lost all of the data I wrote to the drive, thankfully it was just a bunch of repeating bytes created by Iometer. I attempted the same thing again (twice) and couldn't duplicate the issue. I'm going to assume this was an Iometer related issue (or a problem with creating a single ~9TB file on the array), but it's worth disclosing regardless.
The only other time I had an array go bad was when I swapped in four SandForce SSDs and created a giant RAID-0 array. One of the drives simply dropped out of the array, forcing me to delete and recreate the array. As I mentioned earlier, I can't be entirely sure if this is a Promise issue, SandForce issue or a little of both. I never had a drive mysteriously disappear when using the Hitachi drives that came with the Pegasus however.
Other than the issues I've mentioned here, I didn't encounter any problems during my testing of the Pegasus R6.
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darwinosx - Friday, July 8, 2011 - link
Hardly anyone uses projectors so VGA ports should only be on business class laptops.Zok - Friday, July 8, 2011 - link
Can't say I agree with you there. Despite being issued a corporate laptop, I use my personal one for most of my work, including (VGA-requisite) projector presenting.cacca - Friday, July 8, 2011 - link
some questions:Does USB 3 port do the same?
Does the PCI-E external do the same?
Does External SATA do the same?
Thunderbolt is just another PROPRIETARY standard that competes with others.
It reminds me RAMBUS.
were cost and compatibility matters. Is faster but....
We will ever seen a review of something from Intel that points out the shortcomings?
or this place is ADDtech instead of anandtech?
André - Friday, July 8, 2011 - link
Rest assured that USB 3.0 does NOT in any way or form do the same as Thunderbolt.The protocols are very different, as in, USB 3.0 nearly doesn't support any and Thunderbolt being an extension of a 4 x PCI-Express slot does support heaps of features, like Target Disk Mode, S.M.A.R.T.-status, Native Command Queuing, daisy-chaining (with very low latency) making it ideal for many professional applications (Audio/Visual devices), bi-directional bandwidth, DisplayPort, 10 Watt of power and native software driver support.
Just to name a few.
External SATA doesn't do the same either.
Thunderbolt is a multi-purpose connector, not limited to only storage or transfer of files.
If you for a minute think that USB or E-SATA does the same as Thunderbolt, then you need to educate yourself.
It has the potential to replace all other external connectors. One cable to rule them all, instead of legacy cables that clutter up the backside of your computer and collect dust.
Anato - Friday, July 8, 2011 - link
And one controller (maker) to rule us all. Thats a big problem in PC, but not necessarily in Mac.Jaybus - Sunday, July 10, 2011 - link
Not really. Light Peak is essentially protocol agnostic. It tunnels PCI-E. The PCI-E-to-whatever bridge is built into the cable and/or dongle. In other words, a USB 3.0 adapter/hub that plugs into a Light Peak port is possible and even likely.While Intel may control the Light Peak controller, which will no doubt be integrated into motherboard chipsets, I don't think that will give them a monopoly on the bridge chips that make LP actually useful.Exodite - Friday, July 8, 2011 - link
Cue 'potential'.It's not hard to foresee another Firewire or mini-DP in the making, or a Beta if you prefer going old-school.
Coupling Light Peak technology with mini-DP was a mistake. The technology is new, unproven and offers precious few usage scenarios with non-existent device support. Piggy-backing it on mini-DP, which suffer from pretty much exactly the same issues, won't help adoption rates.
Choosing USB over mini-DP as the 'legacy' interface would have been a much better choice.
André - Friday, July 8, 2011 - link
Except that the USB connector is only allowed to be used as an USB connector.DisplayPort is also vastly superior to any other display cable standard, so I cannot see the problem in that regard. Mini-Display is already shipping in millions and millions of computers, as well as Mini-DisplayPort. The same can be said by Thunderbolt, even though it is only Apple who have fully embraced the technology.
As a professional in the audio/visual segment I can hardly see the problem with it being a repeat of FireWire, because my market usually adopts the better technology despite of a small price increase. Of course, it helps that we only use Apple computers to begin with and have already ditched all the back-alley, legacy connectors.
Uritziel - Friday, July 8, 2011 - link
Heh, yet another continuation of the myth that media professionals only use macs...André - Friday, July 8, 2011 - link
Kindly don't put words in my mouth ;)I didn't say media professionals only use Apple computers, I said my company only use them.
As for now it only makes sense to discuss Thunderbolt and Apple computers as Apple are the only ones who has it currently.
But you just have to look at the companies that are releasing Thunderbolt enabled devices to understand that this connector is really something professionals are going to use. Next year the market will open up when PC vendors finally, if they so choose, to embrace the technology.