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OWC Mercury Pro LTO to Mac mini M1
When I found out about the news that Tolis was no longer, I’ll be honest, I panicked. A little history. I felt that I am on that edge where I do need to update my archiving solution. I have been running Bru since 2014, now at 3.X.X quite easily on my iMac which is fairly old and is now locked in and will never be updated.
Through out this year, I was trying to be proactive and setup Argest on my PC but was never able to get it to run properly. Then the news of Bru came out. I then devised a plan( probably to hastily.) I have been archiving LTO-5 until late 2018 when I upgraded to LTO7. In November, I figured now is the time to just bite the bullet and move up to OWC MercuryPro LTO8.
Thinking I would Restore LTO-5 on my LTO-7 deck and archive those to LTO-8. I was archiving some sessions(testing) with the LTO-8 deck and a thunderbolt3 enabled PC using Pre-Roll Post with some frustration as I would get errors in the LTFS archiving rendering the tape un-readable. There was a time or so I was able to go back a session and re archive, but that was once. Not sure this is the fault of PreRoll Post, LTFS drivers or possibly the connectivity. It just feels unrealiable after two -three weeks of testing and trouble shooting.
So I purchased a mac mini with a M1 chip. I had great success with my LTO-5 and now LTO-7 via SAS-to-Thunderbolt to the iMac. It was and is still solid. So why not think that would be the same for the newer technology of thunderbolt 3 LTO deck to the Mac Mini.
Long story short… I am having issues getting the software to see the LTO deck. I see that it is being seen in the OS level(System Report), but I have tried at least three LTO Software with out any luck of them seeing the LTO deck. I have reached out to OWC with no technical help as of yet. Any thoughts or suggestions would be helpful.