[Tim Jones]

Take a look at this blog post, it may give you some insight –

Disk I/O Speeds, RAID levels and Spindle Count

Tim
—
Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!

[Tim Jones]

You’ll find that LTO tape is truly your best solution for long term, large data storage. You don’t say what platform you’re on (and that does matter), but if it’s Mac OS X, our BRU Producer’s Edition software with our ArGest tape storage solutions is a great and reliable answer:

TOLIS Group ArGest Tape Storage Bundle Solutions

Tim
—
Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!

[Tim Jones]

In that case, I’d recommend that you take a look at the Windows version of PreRoll Post from Imagine Products (Dan?) for your archival moving forward – https://www.imagineproducts.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=9&products_id=54. It will give you a good Windows LTFS experience. Also, look into an LTO-6 drive as the drive tech replacement since it will give you good capacity and performance while still allowing you to read the LTO-4 TAR tapes created by your Cache-A system. LTO-7 won’t read LTO-4 tapes.

For the Cache-A tapes, you’ll need to find a tar solution for Windows or load up a Linux box since you’re not in a Mac-centric shop. On the Mac, we have a solution for TAR tapes (and the Cache-A format specifically), but we don’t offer that on Windows.

Tim
—
Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!

[Tim Jones]

Hi Dave,

What’s your platform – Mac or PC?

Tim
—
Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!

[Tim Jones]

Where are you seeing this date oddity? In the restore panel or in the job completion summary?

This is one that you really should open a support ticket for – support.bru..com.

Tim
—
Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!

[Tim Jones]

Hi Jack,

Any updates?

Tim
—
Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!

[Tim Jones]

Relative to the costs of recreating lost content – used in the project or not – LTO tapes are very cheap.

Develop an identification process that fits your workflow and deliverables content and archive everything.

Tim
—
Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!

[Tim Jones]

Hi Jack,

LTO-4 SAS drives are rated at 80MB/sec for HH and 120MB/sec for FH. A Firewire 800 drive will deliver between 65MB/sec and 75MB/sec depending on how it’s formatted and the data type.

With those numbers, what WERE you seeing before and what ARE you seeing now in BRU’s summaries? You can get these numbers from the bruexeclog:
/Library/Application Support/BRU PE/log/bruexeclog
For example:
20160315 09:05:09|36227|tjones|[L163] START (r 18.1.0.25), CMD = 'bru -cvvvf /dev/null -b 128k /Volumes/ArGest Cube HDD45/LJA Training/'
20160315 09:05:09|36227|tjones|[L167] device = /dev/null, buffer = 128K bytes, media size = , archive id = 56e832b58d83, (Op)
20160315 09:05:33|36227|tjones|[L182] wrote 5533568 blocks (11067136 KBytes) on volume [1], 0:00:24, 461130 KB/sec
Since you’re still running that very old version of BRU PE and the same version of OS X, the software has not changed. This leads to the hardware (including your Mac system’s Firewire chipset) as the most logical culprit.

What number do you see if you use BRU PE’s I/O engine to write to /dev/null (the bit bucket)?
sudo bru -cvvvf /dev/null -b 128k /Volumes/FirewireDrive/DataFolder
As an example (you may need to scroll this section horizontally to see the whole thing on The Cow…)-

$ bru -cvvvf /dev/null -b 128k /Volumes/ArGest\ Cube\ HDD45/LJA\ Training/
archive ID = 56e832b58d83
label =
buffer size = 128k bytes
media size =
c 0K [1] /
c 0K [1] /Volumes
c 0K [1] /Volumes/ArGest Cube HDD4
...
c 10985216K [1] /Volumes/ArGest Cube HDD45/LJA Training/FCP X 10.2 - Effects/Chapter 9 - Color Correction/FX2 09.11 NEW Pleasantville.mov
c 11007872K [1] /Volumes/ArGest Cube HDD45/LJA Training/FCP X 10.2 - Effects/Chapter 9 - Color Correction/FX2 09.12 NEW Broadcast.mov
bru: [I181] wrote 5533568 blocks (11067136 KBytes) on volume [1], 0:00:24, 461130 KB/sec

That 461MB/sec is higher than what you’ll see, but I only have one of my Thunderbolt-conneted 6 drive arrays available to test right now.

Answer to these will give us more info to work with to troubleshoot what you’re running into.

These same steps are good for any BRU user to check whether they are running into a source drive bottleneck or issues with their tape drive(s).

Tim
—
Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!

[Tim Jones]

Also, we’re seeing a lot of LTO-7 purchases with the customers sticking with LTO-6 media for the time being. Then when the LTO-7 media price drops, they’ve already got the hardware in place to move to the higher capacity of the Gen-7 media.

Tim
—
Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!

[Tim Jones]

While TOLIS Group won’t be there, CatDV / Squarebox will be. The combo of CatDV Pegasus, DAX Broadcast Archive, and BRU Server provide a completely integrated management and archival solution that is both cost effective for small to mid-range shops. Once configured, the entire process from ingest and logging to archive and retrieval are managed completely from within the CatDV desktop application. Your editors / loggers don’t need to be IT specialists to archive or restore a single clip or an entire project.

We offer complete packages that include everything (software, tape, disk storage) except your Mac or Linux system hardware to act as the server. And, if you purchase from TOLIS Group, we will install and perform your initial configuration as part of the purchase.

For more details, check out https://www.tolisgroup.com/argest-media-asset-management-solutions.html

Tim
—
Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!