Promise Pegasus Drive Failures

I have a Promise Pegasus R6 (6x3TB) that was purchased in January 2013. It's been a reliable workhorse in general... but I've just experienced my 3rd drive mechanism failure. Had one drive fail in May '15 and a second in October '15. I get that drives fail over time, but a 50% failure rate in 3.5 years is a bit much in my opinion. So anybody who has one of this vintage (that uses the Seagate 3TB mechanisms) – keep an eye on your RAID and frequently run the Promise utility to check for any early signs of impending failure.

I have a generation 1 Pegasus R6, and a Thunderbolt 2 Pegasus R8. I too had 2 drives to fail on my R6 in separate incidents back in 2011/2012, I upgraded the stock drives away from Seagate for increased space and haven't had a problem since. Never had a problem with my R8, thankfully.

They really are workhorses, can't wait to see the next iteration. I've heard good things about G-Studio RAIDs, any experience with them? Though, I feel pretty loyal to the Pegasus line.

I have an R4 with 2 x 4TB Toshiba drives which has been 100% reliable so far, starting from October 2013. I think studies show that RAID systems tend to have groups of drive failures. IOW, when one HDD in a RAID fails, others often follow. This might be due to the similar physical environment or maybe the drives came from the same production batch.

HDDs have a finite operational life and I've seen failure curves showing the annual probability of a failure increases to 20% by the fifth year. This varies a lot from one make/model to the next.

An even bigger problem with hardware RAID solutions like the Pegasus is if the chassis itself fails, the drives cannot be used in anything else besides that chassis type. You can't pull them out and read them individually or put them in another brand of hardware RAID box.

Promise also has a very restricted list of drive make/model and HDD firmware they officially support. You can use other types but they don't support it, FWIW.

For this reason my newest 16TB RAID-5 box is an OWC Thunderbay 4 which uses 4 x 4TB HGST drives. Despite using SoftRAID it is faster than the Pegasus R4 hardware RAID, plus if the chassis fails I can salvage the drives and read them in any RAID or JBOD chassis by using SoftRAID.

The Pegasus R4 RAID sync times are incredibly slow for certain stripe sizes. The Thunderbay is much faster, although I haven't run official benchmarks: photos.smugmug.com/photos/i-pdz6p2j/0/O/i-pdz6p2j.jpg

That is good advice about checking the drive status with the Promise utility. The front-panel drive status LED should turn red if it totally fails, but the Promise utility log could be kicking our errors prior to this failure.

If you want to keep the R6 chassis and upgrade the HDDs the 6TB and 8TB HGST Ultrastar drives are very good and have a five-year warranty: www.hgst.com/products/hard-drives/ultrastar-he8

I don't know if those drives are compatible with the R6, so you'd have to check that.

Hello

Th Seagate 3TB drives have had higher failure rates than most other drives.
Check out the study done by Backblaze:
www.backblaze.com/blog/3tb-hard-drive-failure/

That study showed the problems with the 3TB Seagate was unique and the 4TB model has good reliability. Unfortunately it is difficult or impossible to identify ahead of time when something like that will happen, as it cannot be revealed by short-term testing.

This is shown by this data from 2013 to 2015 which showed Western Digital Drives had the overall worst reliability, not Seagate: www.zdnet.com/article/the-most-reliable-...ording-to-backblaze/

However the problems with the 3TB Seagate drive were so severe they are facing a class action lawsuit: www.extremetech.com/extreme/222267-seaga...-drive-failure-rates

Seagate drives have never really been reliable to say the least. I'm amazed that such an expensive RAID system comes with such low-quality drives. So far the G-RAID stuff seems reliable.