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OWC Mercury Pro LTO to Mac mini M1
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Tim Jones,
I’m a bit curious how you took me stating that Thunderbolt 3 has a certification for Windows and MAC, and saying it’s relating to your M1 driver? The OP was mentioning it didn’t work on Windows for him as well and I noticed OWC advertises Windows compatibility, while not holding Intel / Thunderbolt certification for Windows per the Intel website.
If a software company closes down sales and support that means their software is dead. If someone attempts to resurrect it later, then it’s semi-alive when that happens, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a large amount of users have moved on, as anyone serious about their data would have done so immediately.
My performance statement isn’t clear or accurate? IBM clearly rates 300 MB/s for half-height and 360 MB/s for full-height. Just because you can pull a few extra MB’s during a very specific case (using dead software) doesn’t mean that the incorrect information should be advertised.
How is an opinion on if you should have great faith in support from a company with no experience in the LTO tape drive space, versus any established LTO tape drive OEM misleading? The OP already said that he contacted support with no response to his questions. I know first hand that the M&E space isn’t like dealing with the IT space, and you generally have to provide more support, and you have to be ready for a quick response, or you’ll lose customers fast.
You may want to re-read what I’ve said, because all the responses you’re giving are going off-base and blindly accusing me of misinformation when everything I’ve said can be verified by multiple legitimate sources. I’m a bit surprised OWC’s PR team would allow these kind of responses for public view.
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No Re-read necessary. Your post was obviously intended to spread FUD and is nothing short of misleading in nature. Rather than turn this into an even grander argument thread, I’ll state simple facts with regard to the meat of this thread:
OWC is fully prepared to support not only a standalone, Thunderbolt 3/4 tape device, but also the newer tape technologies that we currently have in development. As with any major company’s efforts, missteps such as Todd’s communication with our support team can occur, but it’s what we do to correct and resolve those missteps that matter most in the long term.
Regarding TOLIS Group’s demise and the rumors of BRU’s death, BRU is not dead nor does it need to be resurrected. The same design and coding team are also part of OWC and continuing the development and growth of the BRU software solutions.
My summary point to you, @timgerhard, is that we can all coexist here on the forums, as long as we don’t try to use negative representation and FUD to defend a point. Stick to answering generalized questions about the technologies and specific questions that pertain to your products and efforts, and we’ll all be fine here.
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Tim Jones
Chief Solutions Architect
Other World Computing, Inc.https://owc.com, https://macsales.com
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Martin, I have been doing some testing on the OWC LTO and I was able to connect properly to my 2013 iMac which is running 10.14.6 Mojave. I am thinking of testing YoYotta, on this system, as I can connect my LTO-7 Deck and pull archives using BRU and wanting to test archiving using the LTO-8 with YoYotta. I know this is not the best set up because I am going to Thunderbolt 2 via TB3 – TB2 adapter. My hope is that once the driver is ready for the M1 Macs, that I can switch over to that system and archive from there, removing the iMac from the equation when it comes to archiving. In BRU, they have a backup environment that I back up to dropbox, I then import that and put into the New environment on the new system. This has all of my previous archives which I can view and restore from. This is pretty simple. Is there something like this for YoYotta where I can take the Database of the archives and add them to the new computer system? TIA
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Using the TB3 – TB2 adapter is no problem at all, we use them all the time. Even TB1 has 10Gb which is plenty of bandwidth for two LTO-8 drives. One of our Mac mini systems uses a TB1 expansion chassis with an ATTO H680 and it has written petabytes of data to dual LTO-7 tapes in a tape library.
The only limitation would be daisy chaining other devices so ensure you have any TB3 devices first in the chain, then the TB3 – TB2 adapter.
No problem to move the database over to a new Mac. Google for yoyotta export and this should take you to the right support page. Or contact support@yoyotta.com
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Hi Tim, It’s been a bit, but I was checking in to see if the driver has been updated.
Thank you.
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Tim, I was checking to see if you guys have worked out the Apple kernel problem with the m1 Mac and the the Mercury Pro LTO. I have not seen a new driver out yet for the LTO.
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Hey all just wanted to give you an update.
Last April I went a different direction with my LTO solution. I returned the OWC LTO system as I could not get to work properly or any support from OWC. I ended up going with a Magstor LTO-8 system. I have put that drive through it’s paces. I migrated all of my LTO-5 BRU Library to a LTO-8 LTFS Library via YoYotta. In total it is just about 30 LTO-8 tapes. The Magstor LTO-8 hooked up to my M1 Mac Mini and YoYotta found the proper drivers needed and we were off! I can say I am happy and relieved to be up to date on my archiving solution.
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Hi Todd –
I am glad you found a solution with YoYotta. I want to be clear about this, since many of the people that participate on Creative Cow are older now. (old bags – or as Reddit refers to us, as Boomers) – because I am active on Reddit in many video forums. YoYotta is GREAT software. But in fairness to other manufacturers, so is Hedge, and so it PreRoll Post. As I am becomming an old man (as many people here are, and have been doing this for decades), I intend to die on these forums, and I intend to die doing this (no different than Charles McConathy did when he owned the REAL ProMax in Irvine California). You have to move on. Even if you are an “old man” – you cannot remain an “old man” if you are dealing with this technology. Magstor is great. YoYotta is great (as a side note – if any of you want to know what Martin at YoYotta looks like in person – he looks just like Elvis Costello – and if you don’t know who that is – well SCREW YOU – because ELVIS Costello is COOL !!!!!). The world move on. YoYotta has been keeping up, and they have great LTFS firmware. So has Hedge. I am not going to die being one of those “oh, there was nothing better than those CMX days, those 1″ Sony and Ampex VTR days” – screw those old useless people. You have to keep up. And YoYotta keeps up. Magstor keeps up. Hedge keeps up. And then we die.
I am very happy for you.
Bob Zelin
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Hello, I have been talking with Martin from Yoyotta in emails about my LTO trouble, but I have a Mercury Pro LTO drive that I used to use with a 2017 iMac and myLTO software. It was OK. I now have an M1 Max MacBookPro and for the life of me I cannot get the ATTO SAS Drivers to load on my computer. OWC v2.6 driver bundle installed. They’re installed, but they just won’t load on startup. Under PCI in System Information, the system says a SAS device is connected, but the driver is not installed. I cannot use this Mercury Pro LTO drive at all. Is it supposed to be working on M1 Max? Because it’s not for me. Even worse is the OWC support strung me along for more than a week before closing my ticket and telling me to email another OWC address. I dont understand how that even works. Is it over for me to use this drive? I cannot read any of my archived data now.
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I’m not sure what SAS card you have, as it appears OWC use Areca, LSI and ATTO SAS inside their LTO drives. You can try manually loading the driver by entering this command into the terminal. You will need to be an administrator Mac user.
sudo kextload /Library/Extensions/ATTOExpressSASHBA4.kext
That’s for an ATTO H12xx card. If that doesn’t work you will need the name of the driver used for that card, so let us know and we will see if we can help further.
Martin
CTO
YoYotta.com
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