Promise Technologies R6 Thunderbolt Direct Attach Storage

[Charles Wirth]

The box weighs 25 pounds with six drives installed.
The R6 comes configured as RAID 5, formatted for Windows and management software on the drive.
I will swap Hitachi drives and install 120GB Force GT's to see what the maximum transfer rate possible.

http://www.promise.com/storage/raid_...sn1=40&rsn3=47

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The system did not see the drive out of the box, MSI was quick to dispatch a new driver and BIOS file to fix.
This is the drive properly configured in Device Manager.


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I am setup on the new MSI Z77A-GD80 w/Thunderbolt
http://www.msi.com/product/mb/Z77A-GD80.html#!mm=about
Intel 3770K ES Processor
4x Kingston LoVo memory 1600Mhz C9
Corsair H100 CPU Cooler
Corsair Force GT boot drive
Corsair AX750w PSU
Thermaltake SwordM case


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Promise Technologies WebPAM management software.
With correctly loaded drivers the software is light and quick.


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This R6 was configured with six drives, they are Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000.
http://www.hgst.com/deskstar-7k3000
I will ask if there are other drive options, I would feel better with WD enterprise drives.

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I ran AIDA 64 HD benchmark to get some quick numbers on RAID 5 before I switch it to SSD RAID 0
Pretty good numbers, close to the Hitachi specs of 150MB/s x 6 = 900MB/s in RAID 5


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Promise Technology makes their own PCB.
The processor is PMC Sierra and cache memory is Hynix


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WebPAM is the R6 management software. It runs in the browser.
Here are a few more screen shots from the stats and more.


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