Indeed error 6 indicates a drive or tape issue. As you have tried multiple tapes then the drive probably needs repair. A new LTO-7 tape drive is a good idea as you can restore existing tapes and also create new archives. You can use LTO-7 tapes which are faster and have a larger capacity.

Ideally you should have at least two copies, each stored in…

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I agree with Jim that ATTO provides great support. We can confirm that the H680 family of cards continues to work with macOS including the latest macOS 14 Sonoma. These cards can be used with all SAS LTO drives, unlike the R680 which is not compatible with LTO. Note that a lot of Thunderbolt tape drives have an H644 or H608 inside so continued…

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Just to confirm you are seeing a 2 appear on the LED display on the front of the drive? If so this is the troubleshooting advice from the IBM tape drive manual.

Power problem. The tape drive detected that the externally supplied power is outside the specified voltage limits (the tape drive is not operating). Perform the following action:

1. Ensure…

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There are some OWC LTO drives with an LSI 9300 SAS card inside. So a different software driver will be needed. Hopefully OWC can help, as the driver download on their site is just for ATTO SAS cards. Also note that all SAS card drivers needed to be rebuilt to provide support for both M1+Intel Macs. I’m not sure if this has been done for the LSI…

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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…

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Big Sur or Monterey will work well with your HPE LTO drive and LTFS. Here at YoYotta we test those macOS versions with all makes of LTO drives.

Martin

CTO

YoYotta.com

LTO-9 full height tape drives are now available, with half height arriving early next year.

We made a short video comparing LTO-9 to previous generations.

https://yoyotta.com/news.html

Martin Greenwood

YoYotta.com

Low level errors like this don’t give much information and can indicate a drive, tape or interface error. Often after encountering an error LTFS will set the tape into a write protected mode to prevent data corruption. The mTape drive will have an ATTO SAS card inside, ensure that it has the latest firmware and also ensure that the Mac has the…

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Transfer speeds of 360MB/s are using a full height LTO-8 drive. Some vendors incorrectly quote this figure, however for half height drives the speed is 300MB/s. You should see ~305MB/s with most video data. With compression enabled, files like ARI, DPX and CINE will transfer 5 to 10% faster.

Martin

CTO

YoYotta.com

Maybe this is too late for you, but the M1 Mac mini can now be configured with built in 10Gb Ethernet.

Martin

CTO

YoYotta

Virtually all mTape drives contain an ATTO SAS card and there is a universal M1 + Intel driver available from ATTO.

For more details see our mTape support page…

https://yoyotta.com/help/mTape.html

Martin Greenwood

CTO

YoYotta

The new Macs with M1 chips offer great performance, however a lot of hardware devices including LTO drives need new drivers. So far this has restricted their use as archive machines.

However ATTO have recently released new drivers for their SAS and FC interfaces. A while ago Magstor released drivers for their Thunderbolt 3 LTO drives. At YoYotta we…

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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…

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Good point Neil, the R680 card should be changed for compatibility with LTFS. It probably won’t affect the re-chucking behaviour, but may well be causing other issues.

Martin

Hi Hari,

There is no software command to perform this “re-chuck” function. It’s a function performed by the drive.

Also LTO drives are designed to automatically mark and skip over tape when they detect write problems. This allows them to cope with occasional tape issues. However in your case the drive is doing this all the time, which is why after…

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LTO drives do this process of tape ejection and reload sometimes, it’s a re-chuck function performed automatically by the drive when it detects certain errors.

It is not common, when it occurs it’s either a drive or tape issue. Have you tried other tapes ? You may find loading the cleaning tape resolves it. If it’s doing it all the time with multi…

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Inside the unit there will be a SAS card and as David says you will need a new driver for an M1 Mac. Likewise a new driver will be needed for your SAS to TB adaptor. Magstor have released an M1/Intel driver for their tape drives, but other manufacturers are still working on this.

Martin Greenwood

YoYotta Ltd

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,…

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LTFS is a standardised format for storing files on LTO tapes that was introduced with LTO-5. Drives from this generation onwards have hardware changes to support the two physical tape partitions required for LTFS. One partition is used for indexes and the other for data. This partitioning speeds up random access and appending of files to tapes. So…

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I would suggest purchasing a SAS LTO-8 desktop drive, as you probably already have a SAS interface card as part of your Tolis system ? Hopefully it’s an ATTO card and you can use this to connect the new LTO drive. Then start making LTFS archive tapes for your new projects. Also you can use BRU to restore the existing tapes and migrate these to…

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You are in a good position as you have the LTO tapes and also the hard drives. If you have an LTO drive then it would make sense to write new tapes in LTFS format as this has cross platform support from multiple vendors. It’s probably easiest to do that from the hard drives. If you don’t have an LTO drive, then I would look at buying/renting a…

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Hi Jim,

Just to clarify one thing… all LTO drives have a SAS or Fibre Channel interface. What I think you saw is an all in one solution. MagStor, mLogic, NetStor, OWC and others make units that convert Thunderbolt to SAS for an internal LTO drive. This simplifies connection to a Mac. Some also have an external SAS port so you can connect an older…

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