Promise DS4600

[Purite Audio]

Just looking at the Promise DS4600 DAS, looks to be perfect for attaching to my Mac, choice of RAID configurations, quiet etc, anyone tried one?

Keith.

 

[RayW]

I've been using one for a few months now with my iMac and am generally satisfied.

 

I bought it diskless and installed four of the Hitachi 1 TB Enterprise grade drives from the C.A.S.H. List. It is configured as RAID 5. Setup went smoothly. The drive trays are rather flimsy plastic, but it doesn't really need to be rugged, I guess.

 

I initially connected it to the FireWire 800 port on the iMac. The FireWire 400 port connects to a Weiss DAC2. There were a few occasions on which DAC would stop working. (There is only one FireWire controller servicing both ports.) I switched the DS4600 to USB and have had no such problems since.

 

It has a variable speed fan. Most of the time I can't hear it, but it does have an annoying habit of reving up the fan for about 1 second on occasion. This is only noticeable if no music is playing. Disk seeks are also audible if no music is playing.

 

The DS4600 comes with a host application which allows checking health and status of the drives, which I like. On the other hand, this application has crashed a few times!

 

Ray

 

[Purite Audio]

Thanks for that Ray, sounds ok apart from the noise .in my room it is quite difficult to site external storage , I would really like something extremely quiet SSD's ideally!

Keith.