No fun yet: when you plug it in, you have to allow it to run a Synchronization routine, which takes many hours. So I unpacked The Beast and read the Quick Start guide. I planned to consider a later migration to RAID 10, which may under some circumstances allow two disks to fail while keeping your data recoverable, albeit at the cost of halving the capacity of the array. The Pegasus ships preconfigured with RAID 5 and that's how I intended to use it at first. I am no expert (as you can tell) but this level gives you very fast read speeds and a degree of protection: you need at least three physical drives but if one of them fails, you can 'rebuild' your data using a spare. It slows things down but it backs things up.Ī good compromise is RAID 5, which does clever stuff across all the drives so that file data is striped across the drives, but so is parity data. RAID 1 mirrors data from one physical drive to another in a two disk array. So there are options to help you avoid this. RAID 0 does just this: it turns, in the case of this Pegasus drive, six 2TB drives into one 12TB drive with astonishing speed.īut RAID 0 has a major problem: if just one of your physical drives fail, then all your data is gone. It's like having six two litre water pistols instead of one twelve litre water pistol. So when you access a file, it starts spinning off all your disks a once, effectively giving you speeds that can (over the right connection such as Thunderbolt) pretty much match the speeds of the internal SSD. It then splits the data between several physical disks, all spinning at once, by a process known as 'striping'. RAID allows you to create a 'logical drive' by combining several physical drives into one virtual drive.
By comparison my Macbook Pro's SSD speed tests are read speeds of between 300 and 400MB/s and the one in my Mac Pro goes far over 1,000 MB/s. Let me explain, for those who aren't RAID savvy, what that means: most external hard drives spin at about 7200 rpm - and that means, even over Thunderbolt, a data transfer speed for a single drive of 100MB/s or thereabouts, which seems not fast enough for what I need. It promised extreme speed and the usual benefits of RAID.
So I ordered what seemed sensible - the Promise Pegasus2 R6 12 TB. Off I went to the online Apple Store and discovered that there are very few Thunderbolt 2 options yet available. My bad but like I said, I'm just a photographer. The new MacPro has Thunderbolt 2 and so I blundered into thinking that I therefore needed a Thunderbolt 2 drive when in fact I probably don't. So I had to take the plunge and learn more about RAID. I needed that storage to be very, very reliable and very fastĮxternal SSDs were out of the question: too small or, if the right size, astonishingly expensive. I needed at least 3TB of external storage but realistically it has to be able to grow to 5TB fairly soon, maybe more.
I test a lot of gear and that means a lot of comparisons - so not only do I want to be able to find any image very quickly and without switching catalogs, I also want to be able to do both A:B "Compare" and to switch from one full screen image to another instantly. I wanted to be able to have ALL my images in ONE LR catalog, instantly accessible. I quickly realised that my external Thunderbolt hard drive was the source of the problem and I set about looking for alternatives.
I purchased a "late 2103 Mac Pro" and, because it was in stock and therefore allowed me to skip the several week custom build queue, I took the one with the small internal SSD, planning to use it merely for system files and applications.Īll was good until I noticed how slooow Lightroom was compared to my Macbook Pro. To me, it is the washing up after a meal - necessary but of no interest in itself. So as you can see, I'm no Lloyd Chambers - I have no really thoroughly structured, analysed approach to storage and backup. In the past, I've merely added more internal SATA drives to my old-style Mac Pros and then done a bit of backup here and there. We need a lot of storage - and if Lightroom is not to be slowed down by treacle-speed disk access, that means fast drives. Trouble is, I'm addicted to high MP cameras and large files and so, increasingly, are an awful lot of the people I know. I'm just a photographer, OK? I want to shoot, process, print and store and I want to do it quickly and reliably. The timestamp is only as accurate as the clock in the camera, and it may be completely wrong.Warning: this is not a review of the Promise Pegasus 2 R6: I never got that far. If the file has been modified from its original state, some details such as the timestamp may not fully reflect those of the original file.
This file contains additional information such as Exif metadata which may have been added by the digital camera, scanner, or software program used to create or digitize it.