Scott Brown
10
COW Coins
11
Storage & Archiving Coins
Forum Replies Created
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Hi Mads,
Thanks for this advice, very much appreciated.
I’ve found HPE extremely frustrating to deal with, it took months to get my first drive failure resolved and it genuinely feels like they just don’t care about customers.
I fear I may end up having to take legal action against them this time but I will give them time to come up with a solution first.
You would imagine that the first thing they would want to do is take a look at some diagnostic data from my failed drive to see what’s happening BUT they don’t seem remotely interested.
Worryingly they have stated that any HPE product replaced due to a failure is NOT covered by their manufacturers warranty. This doesn’t sound morally or legally right.
Beyond their manufacturers 3 year warranty they have a obligation here in the UK to repair or replace the faulty drive under the Consumers Right Act 2015 and this is the route I’m now headed down.
I’ve lost ALL confidence in LTO tape as a robust and reliable long term archive solution now.
Best wishes,
Scott
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We use Yoyotta which has worked well enough and they have been very helpful with any technical queries.
The user interface badly needs work and simplification though.
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LTO archiving has not been great for our company – we’ve now had two HP LTO-7 drives fail on us despite only very light use. This has us seriously questioning their reliability.
HPE have been a complete nightmare to deal with and their tech support is a complete joke.
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Thanks everyone for the replies help and advice.
I’m still testing various LTO software options but I’m leaning towards Yoyotta at the moment and they were very quick and helpful in responding by e-mail and also above in this forum.
It was sad to hear that Tolis and BruPE is no more as the software worked well for us and the guys were super helpful whenever I contacted them. They went to a lot of effort to help me when a HP LTO drive went faulty out of warranty and through their efforts HP supplied me with a new unit.
In case it’s of any interest, we are using a 24TB Promise raid which connects to our Mac Pro via TB2 and this unit while now getting old, has worked flawlessly.
I’ve just purchase 2 x 36TB G-Raid drives for the office and these are being used in raid 1 (mirrored) copying all our camera media onto two drives for redundancy. They use enterprise class 7200rpm drives and they are running at approx. 250 MB/s which is impressive for single drives.
In the field I use Samsung SSD’s and Lacie drives for daily camera media backups.
I’ll keep you posted on how we get on with Yoyotta
😀
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Just wanted to say a massive thank you to Tim and the entire team at Tolis for coming to my rescue recently when HP were messing me around over a faulty LTO tape drive.
With their help and advice I was able to resolve the issue with HP and they replaced the LTO 7 tape unit.
In my 20 years of running my business, I have to say their customer support is without a doubt the best I’ve experienced and I’d have no reservations in recommending them to anyone.
No company is perfect, and every software application has issues and faults BUT Tolis has always answered my queries quickly and thoroughly.
Even in this very difficult time with Covid-19, they answered a current tech support query quickly and they are working to fix the issue.
Keep up the great work Tolis!
Best wishes,
Scott
Midas Media
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Hi Bryson
Thanks for your input on this…I think we’re going to try the self assembly route first and as you say if we find it isn’t working for us we can always sell and buy the Cache-A solution.
Will let you know how we get on :o)
Best wishes
Scott
Midas Media
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Hi Bryson
I’m in the UK so I’m trying to guess the approximate exchange rates. The best price I’ve been offered on the Pro Cache LTO 5 is $10900 in the UK. I can buy a HP Ultrium 3000 + SAS Card + BRU PE for $5100 so we’re talking about half the cost.
To give you a better idea of our position, we’re a small TV production company and all I require is a safe way to archive our completed projects for off site storage – nothing complicated and we don’t envisage sending LTO tapes to third parties.
I’ll be the only one backing up so I don’t need to worry about non techies scratching their heads trying to figure out what’s going on. LTO 5 is my preferred option because our project files tend to be large and the extra capacity and speed of LTO 5 will make life a lot easier.
Don’t get me wrong, I really like the Cache-A unit, it’s just that there are LOT’s of things I could spend the extra $5800 on :o) Can’t see anything on their web site showing a LTO 5 Prime Cache unit yet?
Am I really going to regret going for my self built option or will it do the job for now?
Arrrggghhh….decisions decisions!!
Best wishes
Scott
Midas Media
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Hi Bryson
I’m in the UK so I’m trying to guess the approximate exchange rates. The best price I’ve been offered on the Pro Cache LTO 5 is $10900 in the UK. I can buy a HP Ultrium 3000 + SAS Card + BRU PE for $5100 so we’re talking about half the cost.
To give you a better idea of our position, we’re a small TV production company and all I require is a safe way to archive our completed projects for off site storage – nothing complicated and we don’t envisage sending LTO tapes to third parties.
I’ll be the only one backing up so I don’t need to worry about non techies scratching their heads trying to figure out what’s going on. LTO 5 is my preferred option because our project files tend to be large and the extra capacity and speed of LTO 5 will make life a lot easier.
Don’t get me wrong, I really like the Cache-A unit, it’s just that there are LOT’s of things I could spend the extra $5800 on :o) Can’t see anything on their web site showing a LTO 5 Prime Cache unit yet?
Am I really going to regret going for my self built option or will it do the job for now?
Arrrggghhh….decisions decisions!!
Best wishes
Scott
Midas Media
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Hi Bryson
Many thanks for your post, I really appreciated your feedback on this as I’m new to LTO and I’m still finding my feet!
I’m now completely sold on CAT DV, however I’m still trying to make a decision on whether to spend the extra money on the Cache-A LTO 5 option or attempt to pull together my own system with a HP Ultrium 3000 + BRU PE software. The Cache-A unit is nearly $8000 more than the self build option. Can you give me some help here? Is the Cache-A unit really going to be worth an extra $8K?
Many thanks.
Best wishes
Scott
Midas Media
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Hi Graeme
Many thanks for your response and it was good to meet you briefly at IBC. We had a bit of a flying visit this year, so I didn’t really get a chance to pick your brain too much on the Red post production workflow.
I can get my head around the Red workflow for people who are used to shooting on film – instead of the traditional telecine route, you use software to bring in your footage and prepare this for edit. Now, this is NOT going to be a realtime process as far as I can see and this is where I start to get a little concerned. For commercials/promos etc this isn’t a big deal, however we tend to work on long form projects and I’m trying to figure out how we can get the Red workflkow to “work” for us, especially if we are shooting overseas on projects where it won’t be easy or even possible to ingest footage. Hence my thinking about a relatime capture card that would “render” the software process obsolete.
With current technology, is 4K real time ingest possible? It would make life so much easier if we could use a Decklink or Kona card to bring in footage, however I do appreciate that you are busy working on the Red workflow at the moment and I do have every faith in your abilitie individually and collectively within the company to pull this off.
I have NO problem with a longer online process, however we need a quick and painless offline workflow that will make using this camera viable for us as a company.
Quality is extremely important to me as a creative person, however when I put my business hat on, the workflow becomes REALLY important and I then start to work on the basis that if HDCAM or DVC PRO HD or HD XDCAM is good enough for the likes of Discovery etc, then it is good enough for me. That said the Red footage was stunning and the creative me often get’s the better of business me 🙂
Best wishes
Scott