[Andrew Richards]

[Frank Gothmann] “I was told by my VAR that ATTOs new PCIe3 controller ESAS-H6F0 will work fine everywhere, including a conbination of RAID boxes and LTO drive (that was a problem with the previous ATTO I am currently using with the drive which is why they told me).”

I was just going by what IBM had qualified for their LTFS on Win7, which is LSI only today. It might work with ATTO, but IBM doesn’t officially support it is all.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Herb Sevush] “Do you know if the Cache-A system is similarly not cross platform?”

Cache-A is totally cross-platform since it is essentially a NAS server with a built-in LTO-5 drive and management software. You mount it as a network share and it does all the work. They are more expensive than BRU-PE bundles, but they are a lot less hassle and they don’t tie up your workstation while they are working like BRU would. Cache-A is managed via a web interface and also writes open standard tar or LTFS. It is as cross-platform as it gets!

If you don’t mind the higher price, Cache-A is going to be a lot less hassle. The guys from Cache-A also frequent this forum and are very supportive.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Phil Hoppes] “On MacPro’s they are out to lunch, even compared to an HP or Dell workstation of equal specs.”

This is simply untrue. HP and Dell offer specs you can’t get on a Mac Pro (GPU’s particularly!), but similarly spec’d systems are similarly priced (as of this post):

HP Z800 = $3,443
Two 2.4GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon E5645 (8 cores, HT, 12MB L3)
6GB (6X1GB) DDR3-1333 ECC RAM
1TB 7200-rpm SATA 3Gb/s hard drive
ATI FirePro V4800 1GB
One 16x DVD-RW

Dell Precision T7500 = $3,409
Two 2.4GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon E5645 (8 cores, HT, 12MB L3)
6GB (3X2GB) DDR3-1333 ECC RAM
1TB 7200-rpm SATA 3Gb/s hard drive
ATI FirePro V4800 1GB
One 16x DVD-RW

Apple Mac Pro = $3,499
Two 2.4GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon E5620 (8 cores, HT, 12MB L3)
6GB (6X1GB) DDR3-1066 ECC RAM
1TB 7200-rpm SATA 3Gb/s hard drive
ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB
One 18x DVD-RW

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

BRU writes a proprietary format by default, but you can and should write with LTFS if you anticipate leaving the Mac platform. IBM’s single-drive LTFS implementation works on Windows 7. Linux has the most complete support for LTFS from all the vendors offering it (HP, IBM, and Quantum). Make sure the drive you get for BRU has Windows driver support on Win7. You might not be able to use the same SAS card for BRU on the Mac (ATTO) and IBM LTFS on Windows (LSI is the only vendor qualified by IBM for LTFS on Win7).

Of course, you can always just keep your Mac around just for BRU duty and share its disk out to Windows. It will take longer to get files to tape that way though.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

Are you hoping to edit off this storage or do you just need a place to archive to?

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

I’m not one of those cynics. That Thunderbolt Display argument is the best evidence we have in favor of something more than a Mac mini.

The suspense for me is not if there will be a new Mac Pro, but rather what it will look like. We both want roughly the same redesign on the case.

[Andrew Richards]

I have to ask. How much free space do you have on your destination storage? And how much data are you attempting to copy there?

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

Not gonna happen.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

Of course, if the cynics are correct and Apple has indeed given up on the Mac Pro, new Xeons could just be the final nail in the coffin.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[moody glasgow] “Actually FW800 is 400 Megabyte/sec or 3200Mbit/s. “

Read your link again:

“IEEE 1394b-2002 introduced FireWire 800 (Apple’s name for the 9-conductor “S800 bilingual” version of the IEEE 1394b standard). This specification and corresponding products allow a transfer rate of 786.432 Mbit/s full-duplex via a new encoding scheme termed beta mode.”

The part later that reads “The full IEEE 1394b specification supports data rates up to 3200 Mbit/s (i.e., 400 megabytes/s) over beta-mode or optical connections up to 100 metres (330 ft) in length” references the IEEE standard, but is not representative of the FW800 that you would ever see in actual use. In any implementation on the market, FW800 means 786.432 Mbit/s or 98.304 MBytes/sec.

So yeah, LTO-5’s 140 MBytes/sec data rate is faster than FW800.

Best,
Andy