Promise dev support was able to recommend the following compatible drives up to 3TB (but not larger) on my legacy R4 unit., but just make sure you have the latest pegasus r4/r6 firmware update first (currently SR 2.44), you can do this on the empty chassis if you need too. 3tb drives (from current compatibility list-link below). The Promise Pegasus R4i is a 4-bay RAID storage solution that utilizes Apple's new MPX form factor for the Mac Pro. Watch our full review for the details. How to Rebuild a failed HDD in Disk Array.
We have a client that does quite a bit of production work. They have a very robust Promise RAID setup (2 x R4 and 1x R6) with over 30TBs of storage. We recently ran into an issue with the drives in the R6 showing up as Dead/Offline. After some back and forth with Promise tech support and conducting our own research we found a rather simple solution. I wanted to document our solution in an effort to save you some time if you encounter this issue.
After a rather serious Florida Summertime storm all the drives on an R6 were showing up offline. Being that this was setup as a RAID 5 this posed some potential data loss. Thankfully, this RAID was the clients versioned backup so worse case we replace the drives and reclone from the working RAID. I still found it highly suspect that 6 drives would have failed so I ran a subsystem report and sent it off to Promise's tech support. Within an hour I receive a response recommending that we upgrade the firmware and see if that resolves the issue. We proceeded to upgrade the firmware on the R6 by doing the following:
Click on Promise utility on the Menu Bar -> Check for updates. - It would prompt for updating the firmware, update the firmware. - After the update, click on subsystem information on the Promise Utility window -> Shutdown/Reboot. - Choose reboot & restart the unit.
After the unit rebooted the drives were still showing offline. I then started to do a bit more research and come to find out that others have experienced the logical drive of the Promise RAID going offline after abruptly losing power. The issue was resolved by forcing the drives back online. Unfortunately, the option to force the drives online isn't available through the Promise Utility GUI but has to be done via the Terminal application. See below for instructions on forcing the drives back online.
Pegasus2 R4 Promise Utility For Mac Rebuild Raid
On the Mac, open the Terminal app and run:
This will open the Promise Utility. Now type the following:
If you have the R6 you will need to add the following commands in order to force drives 5 & 6 online -
After you force the drives online reboot the RAID and you should be good to go.
The Promise Utility will advise you which HDD module failed and you need to make a note of that Bay slot number before turning the system off. Follow these instructions
Prior to beginning the steps please make sure you are using the latest Promise Utility. You can download the Promise Utilty here.
Go ahead and Open the Promise Utility
Soon as you open the Promise Utility it will scream something is wrong. Note**If you see this informational message below, we advise to not accept and then shut down the Mac Pro 2019, finally, reseat the Promise R4i hard drives. There could be a slight chance that the drive did not detect on boot. Reseating and rebooting your Mac Pro will sometimes correct these problem. However; if this screen pops up again, please accept continue with the steps as there could be a dead drive.
Once you've accepted you will notice in the home page dashboard, under the label 'system status', the disk array and logical drive have an 'red circle' on each of them. If you look under the label 'storage overview' you can see that there are 3 drives listed. In the label 'Event Information' you will notice the Logical drive has been set to critical due to the missing drive.
Pegasus2 R4 Promise Utility For Mac Rebuild Raiders
We will confirm the drive is dead by checking the other settings.
Under the Physical Drive Icon you will notice that a Physical Drive is missing from the list.
In this image we are looking at the Disk Array information. Notice the operational status as Degraded.
In this image is the logical drive. The operational status is 'critical' which means that the volume is usuable, but if another drive fails than it will be catastrophic.
Now we've identified that the drive is indeed failed.
Go to the icon --> Disk Array --> highlight select disk array --> than to the far right there are three dots to extend the options. Click on the rebuild and proceed to accept.
Once the rebuild has begun you can monitor the rebuild in the daskboard.
3Please note** If the rebuild does not appear or fails, contact support immediately. Support contact information -> https://support.promise.com/, or call 408 228 1400 option 4
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