Promise Technology Pegasus32 R4 16TB (4x4TB) Hybrid Thunderbolt 3 or USB32 Direct Attached RAID Storage, High Performance External Hard Drive (P32R4HD16US)

I purchased this external array to store photos. I was running a 1 TB (RAID1) G-RAID drive until the Mac G-Raid Configurator refused to recognize my G-RAID drive. I decided to try this 12 TB (RAID5) Promise external drive in the 4 bay configuration connected to an iMac Pro running OS X 10.15.2 (Catalina). I am now also using this drive as my Time Machine backup drive. This 4 hard drive array works out of the box as a Level 5 RAID 12 TB logical drive. It has 1 GB of SDRAM. If a single drive in a RAID 5 drive fails you should be able to still read the data from the redundancy on the remaining drives. You can then replace the failed drive. This is important if you are storing your photographs on an external drive, so that you can recover from a single drive failure. Of course, having a RAID5 external drive does NOT protect you from erasing a photo on your external drive or physical damage, such as a fire, to the entire array. You are still going to need to have some type of off site backup of the data stored on this drive. If you are using Lightroom, you may want to tell Lightroom to _backup_ the Catalogue to the same drive as your photos. If you drag your photo folder to this external drive, you can tell Lightroom to find the new location by right clicking in LR on the folder and choosing "Update Folder Location." Thunderbolt 3 cables are quite expensive and this drive ships with a "short" cable. You need to download and install the Mac driver and Promise Utility first onto your Mac. This unit will do a "synchronization" in background looking for bad sectors so do not be surprised by all the drive activity. If you want to purchase a replacement drive, the Promise Utility reports that _my_ unit has 4 Toshiba MD04ACA4 SATA HDDs. Your mileage may vary. This unit is much quieter than my G-RAID despite have two fans, one for the power supply and one for the drive array. I was able to daisy chain this drive to my G-RAID. The drive goes silent when I put my Mac to sleep unlike my G-RAID. Good news is that I eventually was able to reconfigure my G-RAID drive using a Windows 10 computer and the G-RAID Windows Configuration utility. I then reconnected the G-RAID to my Mac and using the Mac Disk Utility I was able to initialized my G-RAID drive.

Distressed to discover that my pegasus2 8tb raid drive would not be serviced by them. The whole idea was that raid would prevent me from losing my cherished data. What about all the data thats on the drive? so I cant even reformat the drive since the software no longer supports it. No customer appreciation. not inspiring confidence. When you cant respect the effort i put into getting my daymta on your device, I will never buy your product again. That is after having over 8 pegasus raid devices.

This drive is worth the money. This is my second one

Easy setup. Fantastic device. Much better made than my Drobo.

I purchased a Pegasus R6 and later a Pegasus R2 6 for photo and video storage. I used Promise Utility to monitor both. They worked well for years. Then both would occasionally mount, not mount at all, or disconnect soon after mounting. Then they would no longer mount. I had always completed the updates both for Pegasus and my operating system. When I contacted Pegasus for help, I was told they were "legacy" devices that Pegasus no longer supported. A data recovery company said my data was recoverable but would cost more than $11,000. My small business could not afford this expense. At the time I bought the two Pegasus, unlimited cloud storage options didn't exist. I lost 12 years of videos and photos. Be warned that Promise Technology will not provide any support for your product which cost a lot to purchase once the company decides it's too old. Promise may "promise," but it does not deliver on its promise. Promise would not stand by me, so I will not stand by Promise. STRONGLY NOT RECOMMENDED.

I have the older model which crashes macOS 12.5 when the system goes to sleep. I have asked for support several times, but Promise Tech support does not even acknowledge me. The Raid is now a $1000+ paper weight.

This was my second Promise unit, fast, reliable, easy to setup. Completely delivers.