What is best external TB storage for FCPX

After waiting for over a year, I received my new fully loaded 2016 15" MacBook Pro and now waiting to get a 2017 iMac or iMac Pro. With that being said, after reading many reviews for over a year, I couldn't wait to get my hands on a new Pegasus3 R6 24TB. I, along with many of you here have stepped up and purchased a Pegasus, simply due to their reliability and reputation............ Until now, for me anyway.
"I've been going through hell ever since I received two different ones."
I sent back two of these over the past couple weeks on separate occasions. Both had Backplane temperature warnings after 15 minutes with the cooling fan ramping up to 2200 rpm. The first one gave me a warning after transferring only 45GB of video from another external hard drive. With the second one, I didn’t even get that far. I was 15 minutes into the syncing stage when I received the same Backplane temperature warning.
I spent several hours with Support along with computer access to my MacBook Pro with each one. In addition, a test was done "in house" on one of their Pegasus 3 R6 24TB on hand which the Promise techs duplicated the same warning. Promise stated last week that a new Utility update is needed and that the problem is only cosmetic. Cosmetic?? How can this be with the fan running way above normal within 15 minutes. When will we see an actual update?? Couldn't get an answer. They did offer me a Beta Promise Utility Update but, wanted be to sign a disclaimer that would free them of any damages that may occur. Of course, I didn't do so for obvious reasons. I sent back both units and may purchase another one if/once Promise gets this issue fixed........ In all likelihood, it is a software issue but, I'm not going to test it out at my expense. With this being the 3'rd generation of the Pegasus, I don't understand why this issue should even exist.
In addition, I have been conversing with other Pegasus3 R6 24TB owners and came across some very interesting differences. Owners “without" this issue have different Firmware & Serial numbers starting off differently than the two I had. In addition, they “are not” Symply Editions. I now feel that this issue is related to the Symply Editions.
The following link is to a forum which concurs with what I’m speaking of. Follow my reply (8’th one from the top) forward in that post.
forum.promise.com/thread/peg3-r6-for-ima...ing/?postbadges=true
If anyone has this problem, I'm sure your cooling fan has been running high. If so, please report it and let us know here in the forum.

Below you will find the answer I received today from Promise Technology;
Ray,
I’ve forwarded your comments to the engineering team and asked when this will be available. Unfortunately, the release date won’t be until later this year from our corporate office in Taiwan. We are trying to push the date up but there is no specific date being given. I apologize for the delay and the frustration it is causing.
Regards,
John Holland

RayPaula wrote: ... new Pegasus3 R6 24TB. I, along with many of you here have stepped up and purchased a Pegasus, simply due to their reliability and reputation....I sent back two of these over the past couple weeks on separate occasions. Both had Backplane temperature warnings after 15 minutes...

Sorry to hear about this. I went through three R4 chassis and I helped them track down a problem, however after that the R4 was reliable and is still in use today.

Lots of people use Promise RAIDs, so it's normally a good recommendation. That said I have since switched to OWC RAIDs and use SoftRAID. I have four of them incl a 32TB version and they've been very fast and reliable. The only problems I've had were a couple of questions which SoftRAID handled very quickly. They have great support.

Your situation (and mine) shows you can have a RAID chassis failure. If using proprietary hardware RAID, those drives can only be used in a same-brand RAID. By contrast if using SoftRAID, the drives can be pulled and used in any other JBOD RAID box -- you aren't locked in to a single manufacturer.

On the downside the OWC Thunderbay 4 is limited to four drives, plus the seek noise is a little more audible than the Promise unit.

Thanks for the reply..... It's a shame that Promise Technology is handling this problem very poorly. They know this is a problem in which there was 49 units between the two I had. If they can offer a Beta Update within two days, one would think that a normal update would be available long before the end of the year. I've been waiting and anticipating a Pegasus for well over a year........... I'm so disappointed in the company now. I wish I could contact James Lee who is the President and CEO of Promise, but that in all likelihood, will never happen. On the flip side, I agree with you that OWC would be a good alternative. They do have a great reputation and it's good to hear that they have great support. Like you said, the lack of drives is the only problem. As you know, redundancy along with more drives, the better. How do they handle native 4K? Thanks again, Ray

RayPaula wrote: ...How do they handle native 4K ? Thanks again, Ray

For H264 or other long GOP formats, camera-native 4k is predominantly a CPU problem not an I/O problem. Almost any hard drive could handle that.

However transcoding to proxy is often necessary for smooth 4k editing performance, so that increases I/O load by about 1.6x. If you do multicam it increases it by number of cameras. But a three-camera 100 megabit/sec 4k H264 data stream in proxy would still only equate to 12.5 megabytes/sec * 1.6 * 3 = 60 megabytes/sec. The data rate isn't that high.

That said if you ever transcode to optimized media that increases data size and bandwidth by about 8x over H264 camera native. Just dealing with 4k means you often are copying around large media folders so you want good I/O performance for that.

Also, large libraries have their own unique I/O demands separate from the typical sequential nature of video. When FCPX builds thumbnails and accesses .plist files and does SQL calls for the underlying metadata, this creates an intense series of small random I/Os. In general spinning RAID arrays are not good at that, however this mainly happens at fairly large library sizes, say over 5,000 clips.

Except for that (which is manageable) I don't have any I/O problem with any of my OWC RAIDs. I have some in RAID-5 and some in RAID-0.

Spinning RAID arrays will slow down as they fill up, so you can't really plan on using 100% or even 90% of the capacity if you want good performance. SSD arrays don't slow down like that but they are obviously much more expensive. A relatively inexpensive RAID array is the OWC Thunderbay Mini, populated with your own choice of 4 x 2TB SSDs. I used the Samsung EVO 850 in RAID-0 and it does about 1170 MB/sec read, 1240 MB/sec write. Even better it has a good random I/O rate and there's no seek noise.

Great to know the options you given. With four drives, I would probably run in raid 0 instead of raid 5. In that scenario, I would definitely be backing up consistently to a couple external hard drives. In either case I always back up everything anyway. I really hope that Promise will pull through but, I believe it's a long shot at this point. Thanks again for the great information. It certainly gives me another way to look at this. Ray

New comments from Promise Technology can be found in the same link I gave earlier found here;.
forum.promise.com/thread/peg3-r6-for-ima...ing/?postbadges=true