Martin Greenwood
10
COW Coins
6
Storage & Archiving Coins
Forum Replies Created
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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 a different stable environment, if this is the case then there is no immediate need to migrate the tapes.
If you just have one copy then you can start to restore your LTO-6 tapes and then create new archives on LTO-7 storing up to four LTO-6 tapes on each new tape. Regarding newer tape generations it depends on the amount of data that you will be creating. At the moment I would stick to the LTO-7 drive and then reassess the situation in a year or two. LTO-10 stores up to 30TB but is currently expensive, but in the future when the price comes down for drives and media then your 300 tapes would fit on about 20 LTO-10 tapes.
If you have indexes of each tape in the PreRoll Post database then you should be able to export these as CSV files. Then when needing a file you can search the CSV to give you the tape name.
It’s then easy to index that tape and restore selected files, folders or the entire tape using an app that supports LTFS. Our YoYotta software with LTO drive support allows you to do this and you can test the workflow using our demo version.
You can then start to index the other tapes using YoYotta. Note that YoYotta does not import PreRoll Post CSV files. Whilst you have 300 tapes it only takes a few minutes to index each tape and you will then have an accurate snapshot. YoYotta can also be used to verify existing LTO-6 tapes.
I hope this helps, please get in touch if you need more workflow advice.
Martin Greenwood
CTO
YoYotta
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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 driver availability from ATTO is very important. We test the H680 and H1280GT regularly with both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs.
Martin
CTO
YoYotta Ltd
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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 that the power connector is properly seated.
2. Turn power off/on the tape drive to see if the problem repeats. 3. Replace the tape drive if the problem persists.So probably a hardware issue. See what mLogic support say.
Martin Greenwood
YoYotta
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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 card.
Martin
CTO
YoYotta.com
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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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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
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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 latest ATTO driver. See our mTape support page for links to the ATTO drivers.
https://yoyotta.com/help/mTape.html
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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
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Maybe this is too late for you, but the M1 Mac mini can now be configured with built in 10Gb Ethernet.
Martin
CTO
YoYotta
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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