An important note about Apple Silicon Macs and external hardware
updated 1 month ago 3 Members · 5
Posts 
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
We have our MagStor Thunderbolt 3 LTO drivers ready. We’re just waiting for approval to release them to the public.
macOS 11 Big Sur is the most significant operating system upgrade from Apple since the introduction of Mac® OS X in 2001. It features a major redesign of the user interface as well as support for Apple’s ARM64-based processors.
Hasn’t the H680 been “the standard” for ages ?
Bob
The H680 is a great card to use with LTO drives, but it went end of life last month since manufacturing is heading towards PCI-E 4. The H1280 12G version is going to be the new champ with a $100 higher price tag.
MagStor Thunderbolt 3 LTO drives now work on M1 MACs.
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