anyone working with Dell PowerVault LTO 6 drive with mac os?

[Tim Gerhard]

Dell is just a re-badged IBM drive inside just like almost all others.

If you want current drivers and the best support for standalone drives, then buy Quantum brand. Quantum has a dedicated page to standalone drive support.

When you call Dell about anything half the people don’t know what a tape drive is.

Tim Gerhard
MagStor Inc.
614-505-6333
tgerhard@magnext.com
NAB 2018 Booth #SL15816

[Hari Krishna pune]

@Tim Gerhard

Thank you for your suggestion.

As per your suggestion I can purchase the drive from quantum, As I can see some resellers are here. But we are in lack of service providers here in India. That is becoming the main issue. If I have an issue I need to send it back to the company through fedex or ups with our own expenses.

Only the brands that are providing onsite service national wise in India are IBM, HP & DELL. I went through IBM already. I am tired of their irresponsibility.

The distributor where we bought equipment frequently was suggested for DELL. I just spoke with a support executive from DELL and he did confirm that they are not currently supporting for mac os x.

I am also contacting OVERLAND TANDBERG reseller today. Let me check with them if they are providing service or not here in India.

HARI KRISHNA PUNE
FCP EDITOR & ARCHIVE MANAGER

[Neil Sadwelkar]

I’ve found Tandberg to have the best support, in Mumbai (India) at least. Tandberg are also IBM rebadged (at least some models are). Aim to get an LTO-8 drive if you don’t need compatibility with old LTO-6 tapes. If you do need to be able to read LTO-6 and LTO-5 tapes, then an LTO-7 drive is what you should get.

———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Tim Gerhard]

I don’t really think it’s an issue with the hardware though. It sounds like you just had some software issues. The free IBM LTFS is really bad and they don’t care about it. If you have LTO8 on Windows, the drivers aren’t signed and will block you from using it unless you disable “SecureBoot” in BIOS, which is a bad bad idea.

Another pro-tip about using your IBM LTO6 on Windows…. don’t use the latest drivers, use the generic LTO driver built into Windows.

Didn’t you try BRU and liked it? The software vendor you buy from will support you. If you want something more focused on LTFS then myLTO and YoYotta are worth looking at as well.

If you want to use Windows check out XenData Workstation.

Tim Gerhard
MagStor Inc.
614-505-6333
tgerhard@magnext.com
NAB 2018 Booth #SL15816

[Hari Krishna pune]

@Tim Gerhard

Thank you for your response. My work is doing backups of redraw, arriraw, panasonic varicam and sony camera footages for the producers and hand them over to them for the future reference. And they are expecting the backups should be in open format, So that they could check them anytime even I am not available. So I can’t go for BRU because the tape archived through BRU can’t be opened with out the same application.

I hope all the other backup applications are the similar once. I have only checked BRU trial version.

I am regular mac os user windows is not my kind of thing. I just moved to windows to check my previous drive which is having a hardware issue.

HARI KRISHNA PUNE
FCP EDITOR & ARCHIVE MANAGER

[Hari Krishna pune]

@Neil Sadwwelkar

Taking your suggestion I have contacted Tandberg dealer from Mumbai. They have responded very quickly and provided me all the information very generously unlike any other brand dealer.

I was missed to understand one point about LTO-8 drive that it won’t read back LTO-6 media. So I planned and all set to make purchase and last night while I am going through another post I realized this and decided it is not the drive suitable for my current need.

I am now going with 7th generation drive to read back my old LTO-6 media.

HARI KRISHNA PUNE
FCP EDITOR & ARCHIVE MANAGER