[Neil Sadwelkar]

I routinely write tapes, like several times a week, using an Intel Mac mini or Intel MacBook Pro as host computer. I have not yet written a tape using any Apple M1 system as host computer.

I use a standalone tape drives (I have 5) connected to a SAS card inside a Thunderbolt – PCIe box (I have 3 of these). And for software, it used to be Bru PE for a decade but now it’s Yoyotta and Canister.

LTO write speed matches the read speed of the hard drive you’re reading from. I haven’t come across a lower limit, and I often have to backup to LTO-8, from 2.5″ portable drives that read at 60 MB/sec when full. I’ve even seen speeds as low as 40 MB/sec.

Writing to LTO takes longer with file sequences like .dpx, .ari, .arx, .tga etc. meaning 100 GB consisting of 14,000 files, will take longer than 100 GB consisting of 30 files. Longer means about 1.5-2 times as long sometimes. Nowhere near 5 hrs for 9 GB. So that’s definitely an anomaly.

Do you have access to an Intel Mac where to try out your entire setup? There is a likelihood of a driver issue with Apple M1. Your mTape TB3 LTO drive is actually an LTO drive connected to a SAS card attached to a TB3-PCIe converter all inside the same case. So its not vastly different from my setup where these two things are in separate cases.

I checked on the mLogic site and the drivers link links to the Atto drivers page so it looks like your mTape has an Atto 6GB SAS card inside it, same as mine.

The Help Centre at mLogic site also has links to Yoyotta 10 day demo. You could download and try that.

I’m sure the guys at Hedge with do all they can to try and fix the Canister issue. But I don’t think the problem is with Canister, in your setup. It either to do with SAS and LTO drivers for your M1 host computer, and/or errors on the drive with data. Have you tried doing a verify and repair on your source drives?

And one more thing. Are your source drives all HFS+? I’ve found some funkiness with ExFAT or NTFS drives sometimes.

[Neil Sadwelkar]

It is possible to use the Mac mini as a ‘server’ sharing storage with the two Mac Pros, but one needs to know if you have a storage box of some kind already, and the kind of a network you have, in place.

It’s not clear exactly what storage you have. I tried looking up the Areca-8667 and it appears to be a 4port FC 8GB card. Is it attached to some storage box of some kind? Is the Mac mini a 2018 model with 4x Thunderbolt ports? Is the Mac mini attached to some kind of external storage?

Since you have the Mac Pros attached to Solo 10GigE adapters, is there a 10GigE switch that those go out to?

Does the Mac mini have an internal 10GigE thunderbolt port? or is it a 1GigE port.

Are the Mac mini, and two Mac Pros close to each other, like within 1 metre (3 feet) or kept in different rooms?

[Neil Sadwelkar]

Bailey,

There’s no harm sticking to LTO-5 if the 1.5 Tb per tape is sufficient for your needs.

Bru is a proprietary format, but its a robust format. And as my experience shows, is compatible with Argest for recovery.

LTFS is more universal now and is more acceptable for various submissions, if that is something that matters in your workflow.

For LTFS, I have Yoyotta, Canister and PreRoll Post. I never use PreRoll Post as some initial backups were a nightmare and I didn’t have the time to troubleshoot. Yoyotta is what I use the most, for client backups. Because it lets me organise backups, clients and projects neatly in one place. And Canister I use for ‘outdoor’ backups while on set or near set.

Both have their pros and cons. and cost different too.

If you go with Canister, then get a cataloguing software like NeoFinder or DiskcatalogMaker. Both of these let you make offline browsable Finder-like catalogs of the contents of your LTOs. NeoFinder has an advantage in that it will let you import Bru Catalogs. So, all your 200 Bru catalogs can now be in one database where you can search across tapes by filename, and ‘browse’ Bru tapes in a Finder like interface.

But in the long run, you need to consider ‘migrating’ your LTO-5 tapes to LTO-8 or 9.

It will take a while to do this, though. With a 5-day 40 hr week, to restore each batch of 18 LTO-5 tapes, and write to 2 LTO-8 on the weekend, it should take about 3 months.

200 LTO-5 tapes will fit in about 22 LTO-8 tapes (assuming you have about 1.2 TB per tape). If you get (or make) a 2-drive RAID0 of 24 TB, then you can offload about 18 Bru LTO-5 tapes on to it, and then use that to write to 2 LTO-8 tapes. Erase RAID and repeat.

Each LTO-8 will take about 24 hrs to write and verify. RAID0 because the read speed of a 2-drive RAID0 nearly matches the write speed of an LTO-8 tape.

[Neil Sadwelkar]

I’ve had MBPs since the 15″ days and all have had the stock 16GB RAM and 512 GB SSD. I extensively use them for Resolve grade and export dailies.

I also have an iMac Pro with 32GB RAM, and a M1 MBP 13″ with 16GB RAM 1TB SSD.

While transcoding on my Intel 15″ MBP and watching memory usage in Activity monitor, it find that it often comes close to or exceeds 16GB. Of course, M1 has unified RAM with is more efficient so 16GB RAM on M1 might provide better performance than 16GB RAM on Intel.

Still, if you can afford it, get 32 GB RAM.

As far is SSD, even in that, I’ve found 512 GB SSD for video work involves quite a bit of housekeeping and copying out to external disks. If you can, get 1TB internal SSD at least.

[Neil Sadwelkar]

I think your best bet is to take this tape to an older system with MacOS 10.15 or lower, install Bru on it. Its free for restore anyway. I don’t think the Tolis site offers Bru for download any more, but you could get it from someone who has a running system.

I think I may have an old download of Bru-PE that I could loan to you. Its free to read and write for 30 days and free to restore forever.

Neil

[Neil Sadwelkar]

I have no direct experience in using LTO in Windows. Though I do know folks who do, but I’ve no recollection of any of them experiencing what you are. But I do know that Finder or Explorer level drag and drop copying is not a natural method for tape based media. So its likely that additional redundant data is being written/considered in the file/folder sizes.

The way data is written to tape is quite different to how its written to hard drives. This is why, a software layer makes the process more simpler for the computer. Basically, using a purpose built LTO software makes the LTO look and feel more like a hard drive, to the computer.

I can’t seem to find any economical Windows software that’s LTFS based. Archiware is the one that comes to mind but that’s $ 1,680. Over on the Mac side there are many.

There used to be Bru which is now called Argest and has a Windows version for $249. But this does not do LTFS, it writes its own proprietary format. Nothing wrong with that, though and I’ve used Bru since 2009 and have even restored tapes from 2010 recently. But If you have to have LTFS then Argest isn’t right for you.

On Mac there’s also Canister ($300) and Yoyotta ($500) both are excellent for making verified copies and can restore with ease. Yoyotta has better data cataloguing features. But they are Mac only.

[Neil Sadwelkar]

If you don’t use any software for the copying, copying to LTO by drag and drop, then how are you verifying the copy?

Have you actually restored any of these tapes back from LTO to hard drive?

One of the perils of using drag and drop to backup to LTO is that the media on the LTO is somewhat disorganised which makes restoring from LTO to hard disk a long drawn process. Particularly if your media is in the form of frame seq.

Going forward, consider getting a software to do the backup. These kind of anomalies what you’re seeing will be minimised. Since you are on Windows, you could get Archiware.

On a Mac, Yoyotta, Canister, Archiware, many options exist.

[Neil Sadwelkar]

I’ve used a QNAP TS-453BT3 for the past 3 years. It has 4x12TB 3.5″ drive as RAID5 so I get 36 TB usable space on it. I can connect two systems directly with thunderbolt and one with 10GigE plus 4 systems over GigE.

Its portable and to carry it around I use one of those bags which are used to keep soft drink and beer cans cold. That’s padded and waterproof. I actually have two of them one inside another for extra protection.

I have one iMacPro connected over 10GigE and two MacBook Pros over Thunderbolt. When multiple systems read or write, the speed drops since its a 4-bay RAID. But any one system on its own, gets me between 300-500 MB/sec depending on the type of data. Frame sequences read and write is slower than large file read/write.

There is also space inside for 2x SATA SSDs and I did try to put two in there, but that didn’t help much as a cache. If you use those two SSDs inside as independent drives, then that might be useful in some way, maybe as a scratch drive or a cache.

[Neil Sadwelkar]

When your Mac is connected simultaneously to multiple network inputs, data flow follows a ‘service order’. In System prefs > Network, you can ‘set service order’ and place 10GigE or Thunderbolt bridge to the top and it will be used for data transfer.

[Neil Sadwelkar]

The Lacie 1Big dock is a neat unit. I’ve used the 2-bay version of it. As per LaCie web site, the drives inside are from the Ironwolf Pro family. These newer drives beyond 8TB, are noisy. The clicking and grinding, and vibration is all normal, as long as you’re able to mount, read and write, ignore the noise. Or move the drive away.

16TB of spinning noisy drive vs 8TB of silent SSD, of course the SSD looks attractive. But the price difference is substantial.

I’ve also used and own many G-Drives, and even one Seagate Exos inside an single bay Oyen enclosure and a bunch of drives inside a 2-bay Oyen that are placed in and out like cassettes as per project. All of these also work equally well for me.

The way I’ve divided my drive needs is like this. For speed and high capacity, I have a 4-bay TB3 RAID. That gives me over 500 MB/sec and holds 48TB. For portability and reasonable speed but high capacity, I have many 12-16TB drives, some G-Drives, some ent drives inside enclosures. These provide 170-250 MB/sec.

Where I need speed and not much capacity, I have a fleet of 2.5″ SSDs and some M.2 SATA and NVMe SSDs some 1 TB some 2 TB. These work as temp holding drives that let me process raw footage much faster. They provide 500-700 MB/sec.