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An important note about Apple Silicon Macs and external hardware
The new Macs with M1 chips have great performance rivalling the Intel i7 and i9 processors.
However updated drivers are not available yet for certain interfaces like SAS and Fibre Channel. Note that Thunderbolt LTO drives have a SAS interface inside.
Earlier this year Apple provided development hardware to test operation with the new processors, however there were no Thunderbolt ports in these units. The new Macs do have Thunderbolt ports, so manufacturers are working now to test their drivers.
This means there is no Mac M1 support for LTO tape drives and libraries until new drivers are released.
So whilst our YoYotta app works well with M1 based Macs, LTO + LTFS workflow is not possible.
Intel Macs with Big Sur do not need new drivers. We have been testing our software for some time with macOS Big Sur and have found no issues with LTFS.
Martin
CTO
YoYotta