[Tim Jones]

If you have a port available on that SAS RAID HBA, i would recommend that you purchase this 4 drive chassis: SANS Digital TR4X JBOD chassis (around $250) and then add 4 of these Seagate drives: Seagate Constellation 6TB 7200RPM disk (around $250 ea).

That will put you at around $1,250 for the total solution. You’ll see very good speeds (~1GB/sec and 16TB if striped, 750MB/sec and 12TB if RAID 5).

We use a lot of these on both PC and Mac systems using ATTO R680 and HighPoint RR4822 HBAs with zero issues.

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

[Tim Jones]

For that kind of budget, there are a number of spinning disk options.

However, what connectivity options do you have on your PC? Do you have USB-3? eSATA? SAS? The connection type is very important in determining how useful an external storage solution will be for editing.

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

[Tim Jones]

It’s sounds like you don’t have a concern for archival and are just looking to use your LTO media like larger floppy disks, so what’s wrong with the default LTFS tools provided by your tape drive vendor? All of the file copies are handled at the OSXFuSE level and can be managed vi drag and drop from File Explorer or Finder. That’s all that you or your client require for this type of data exchange. If you end up with a bad tape, you just recut to from the original data.

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

[Tim Jones]

It’ll be $49 well spent, but you will need to upgrade.

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

[Tim Jones]

Both machines so that you’ll get good performance from both backup and restore.

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

[Tim Jones]

I discovered and edited that post just as you posted. The other option is to modify Apple’s lazy ACK with this command:

sudo sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0

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

[Tim Jones]

What if you specify smb2://?

[edit] it appears that Apple has removed that option from the mount types in Yosemite … instead, try this option in the Terminal:

sudo sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0

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

[Tim Jones]

Tom, you’re dead on with the HP-based drives. The speed throttling is a big improvement over the IBM solutions. However, we still witness shoe shining if the incoming data rate stays below ~60MB/sec for more than 10± buffer loops (the incoming data drops below the input buffer’s low water threshold for too long).

As to wasting tape, the real result is negligible. In tests involving over 5,000 underruns, the capacity of an LTO-5 tape still remained slightly above 1.5TB of uncompressed data. While there is an impact in performance do to the repositioning, the real world capacity is not recognizably affected.

If you want to have some real fun, raise the ambient temp to around 60ºC and drop the 12 volt line to 10.4V (these are far outside rated operating norms). The HP-based drives STILL successfully wrote and read data.

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

[Tim Jones]

Not sure – I’ll ping Devon.

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

[Tim Jones]

Correct. The only slow down would occur if your disk drive(s) can’t supply the data fast enough.

I recommend looking at BlackMagic’s Disk Speed Test tool to get an idea of how fast your disks are. If you can’t read 180MB/sec off of the disk, you’ll never be able to stream 1 LTO-6, let alone 2. A 4 disk, USB 3 Striped array using 7200RPM drives is capable of delivering the data fast enough to feed 2 LTO-6 drives. On the other hand, a mirrored, 2 drive USB solution isn’t.

Remember, if your backup tool can’t read the data faster than the tape drive can write it (180MB/sec with BRU for example), then the backup application (BRU, LTFS, etc.) will spend most of its time waiting on the filesystem rather than writing to the tape.

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