pegasus vs. Areca 8050T2

[adam christl]

I need a new raid tower to go with my new mac pro. I'm kinda leaning towards the Areca ARC-8050T2, over the Pegasus. I'm heard a mix of opinions on these boards regarding both brands. A vendor friend seems to think the Pegasus is a bit prosumer, but isn't familiar with Areca.
They both look pretty similar in terms of 8bay, T2 etc. I guess the Pegasus looks nicer... The rep for Areca sent me some tech specs and while I take any specs sent by the company with a grain of salt they did seem slightly better than the pegasus.
Any thoughts here?

I'm all ears.

:)

[Scott Brown]

Hi Adam

From my own personal research, it looks like the Pegasus is more user friendly for non "techies". It can only be purchased with drives whereas the Areca can be purchased bare and populated with your own drives BUT it appears that setting this unit up is quite tricky (see Larry Jordan's blog for more info).

In short, Pegasus is more expensive but is plug and play with a clean user friendly GUI. The Areca is cheaper with slightly better performance but is more complex to set up and maintain.

For me, I'm leaning towards the Pegasus 2 18TB unit.

Best wishes

Scott

[adam christl]

Hmm interesting. I never really thought about the difference in those terms. I'm def. not afraid to open a piece of hardware up and get myself into a world trouble, but there is something nice about plug and play.
I will look into Larry Jordan's blog. Thanks Scott.

[Isaac Marchionna]

The ARECA, for sure. Since Promise's markup on drives sucks. And yes the setup is annoying, but once you get that done you'll thank the extra 500 dollars you saved.

[Antony Newman]

I'm exactly in the same boat.

Just asked OWC when they are getting the ARC-8050T2 in stock.

And then skimmed the BlackBlaze blog: http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21...-should-i-buy/

And am currently inching towards 8 x Seagate 4TB drives in the Areca.

My gut feeling is that the Pegasus solution is charging you per TB rather than the underlying HW costs.

(which is why I've just ordered a 10c Xeon, 64GB OWC memory & OWC 'mac tools' from B&H ... it's cheaper!)

AJ

(I wonder if I'll be the only person on this forum with a 10c nMP?)

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I'm anxious to try one of the new Areca units. I found their TB1 version to be a bit more robust and better built than the Pegasus. However, I found the TB1 version of the Pegasus to be superior in performance. About equal in terms of RAID reliability, or at least never had any problems with either of them. I've been told that the performance on the new TB2 Areca units is much improved.

My personal choice for drives in the Areca would be 8 x 3TB WD RE4's.

Antony, I'm very curious to see how your 10 core nMP setup works out! I've been thinking of doing the same, but don't need another one at the moment and the 8-core is doing alright. I suppose if I could pick up a 4-core with D700's without the long wait I might give it a try, but at this rate, I may just hold off of further nMP purchases until we see updated Xeons in about a year. Heh.

[Chris Henze]

Super happy with my Areca 8050. A little challenging to set up but now that I have it working it's great. Fast and cheap.

[Isaac Marchionna]

I should have the new Areca thunderbolt 2 next week. They're starting to ship around 2/25.

[adam christl]

Yeah I had a feeling it was hard drive mark up mostly. I have no problem putting in a bit of sweat equity to get things set up.
Jeff - thanks for the recommend on the drives.
Was going to be my next question.

[Isaac Marchionna]

Cineraid is selling them for 1600.00, with a delivery date of 2/25. I think setup took about 20 minutes and then a few beers of waiting for the drives to format.