Tim Jones
Forum Replies Created
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I’m not exactly sure how the “data was fine” but the drive needed to be reformatted. If you reformat the drive, the data is lost … odd bit of input from OWC.
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
Michael,
While it’s a bit more expensive, by investing in a true SAS solution that is connected via TB adapter, you will have far more options moving forward. One good recommendation would be a combination of the Sonnet Tech SE-I Thunderbolt 3 to PCIe chassis. This allows you to install 2 PCIe HBAs. The result would give you the ability to add a true SAS HBA like the ATTO R680 or the HighPoint RocketRAID 4522 and later add a 10GbE network adapter.
You could then use anyone’s SAS tower to hold and power your disks – we like the SANS Digital TR4X and TR8X units. These are cost effective, quiet, reliable (we have 2 that are over 8 years old), and can support any 3.5″ SATA/SAS disk out there. You could load a TR4X with four 12TB and end up with 32TB of RAID-5 capacity. Here are some non-affiliate links so you can get an idea of the costs.
Sonnet Echo Express
https://www.sonnetstore.com/collections/thunderbolt-expansion-systems/products/echo-express-se1-thunderbolt3SANS Digital 4 bay
https://www.amazon.com/Sans-Digital-TR4X-HA-TowerRaid/dp/B00JOCDC6Y/ATTO R680
https://www.amazon.com/atto-technology-esas-r680-000-expsas-adapter/dp/B007MOUCLO/HighPoint RR 4522
https://www.amazon.com/HighPoint-RocketRAID-4522-External-Hardware/dp/B009YSSREA/Seagate EXOS 12TB Enterprise grade disk
https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Enterprise-Capacity-ST12000NM0007-7200RPM/dp/B0759Q9FXZ/Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
That’s very odd to occur often enough for you to even worry about it. Are you using quality disks, or just desktop/consumer disks thrown together.
The units we sell use Seagate Constellation ES.3.5 enterprise drives and we have systems out there that have 100,000’s of hours and zero disk failures. That you are seeing this type of corruption makes me suspicious of either the drives or the RAID controller that you are using. You don’t mention who’s RAID adapter you are using – is it ATTO or HighPoint?
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
JBOD – no. RAID-0 – yes. You can stripe (RAID-0) from the Mac OS disk manager with no further software or RAID hardware. RAID-0 than gives you the aggregate speed of your combined disks while JBOD give you each disk as a separate volume, and therefore you never see better than the speed of a single disk.
Having said that, I’m a strong proponent of RAID-5 if you have no other non-disk backup. If you lose a disk, you can replace it with no data loss. You will either need soft RAID software or a RAID HBA to achieve RAID-5 as it’s not provided in Appple’s default disk management.
If you go with the RAID-5 option, I recommend ATTO’s R680 or ThunderStream.
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
For anyone following this thread, the issue with the BRU PE Import Tool as been sorted and a new version is included in the 3.1.29 BRU PE update DMG.
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
We have one system running the GTX 1080 Founders edition and the results are mixed. When it’s working, it’s a beast, but simple things like color or titling with BCC can cause things to stutter and hang for seconds until the render completes or the control panel is closed. We’re current running the 390.65 driver version under Windows 10 Pro.
A similarly configured system with the GTX 980 is fine in similar work.
If you browse various Adobe-centric sites, others are reporting various levels of success with the new 1000 family.
I’d say wait, or ask Adobe directly.
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
I have to totally agree with Bob. In interfacing with the big studios and post houses, what you know about the technology and how to best utilize it weigh far more into landing a job in a real situation (you know, one that can pay the bills) and is far more important than an indie short and 2-4 years of film school – which is only going to get you an AD position or possibly an ADP position – mostly at the intern level.
However, KNOWING about mezzanine formats, media management, encoding and transcoding, and storage and archival will land you a serious position with almost any of them. Not everyone can be a director or DP. Most productions only need 1 of each. However, every production needs people that understand storage technologies and the manner in which the various platforms, filesystems, and devices work together.
Spending your money on an LTO solution and some storage so that you can learn about storage formats, filesystem pros and cons, media management, and archival needs is a much more productive – and far less expensive – school of hard knocks than spending 5x that cost on schooling that is more often out of date other than the basics by the time that you graduate.
To further restate Bob’s comments on free software –
LTFS is free, but it comes with the support and assistance that you get with anything free – if you break it, you get to keep the parts. Things like StoreOpen and OpenLTFS are simply GUIs that sit on top of the arcane command line incantations required to make LTFS work – assuming that the LTFS suite you have located actually works properly on your platform (Windows, Mac OS, Linux). And, if it doesn’t work, you’re at the mercy of your peers since the LTFS suite is released as Open Source and contains the caveat in the license that:
3. WARRANTY DISCLAIMER
TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, QUANTUM AND ITS SUPPLIERS PROVIDE THE SOFTWARE “AS IS” AND WITH ALL FAULTS, AND HEREBY DISCLAIM ALL INDEMNITIES, WARRANTIES AND CONDITIONS, EITHER EXPRESS, IMPLIED, WHETHER BY STATUE, COMMON LAW, CUSTOM OR OTHERWISE, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, WARRANTIES OF TITLE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT, ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES, DUTIES OR CONDITIONS OF MERCHANTABILITY, OF FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, AND OF LACK OF VIRUSES. Quantum does not warrant that the operation of Software will be uninterrupted or error free or that the Software will meet Licensee’s requirements. Some states/jurisdictions do not allow exclusion of implied warranties or limitations on the duration of implied warranties, so the above disclaimer may not apply to Licensee in its entirety.
HPE, IBM, and others have very similar wording in their licenses and IBM even goes so far as to tell you that they offer no support for the LTFS tool chain.
Investing $300 to $500 in a software solution that DOES provide support is a smart investment unless:
- A) You really don’t care about the reliability of the solution
- B) You are a C/C++ coding wizard
- C) You are very literate in the way tape devices work at the low-level SCSI layer
- D) You know how to create and debug kernel-level code for your platform
Otherwise, as I said above, if you break it, you get to keep the pieces.
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
I’ll second Paragon’s products – we recommend both the NTFS tool and the virtual disk tool for users almost daily.
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
Michael – BRU PE and BRU Server are very different in the manner in which they deal with tapes in a library (you’re using BRU Server). BRU Server uses the tapes by access age, not position since we’re trying to spread tape use across all of the volumes in a destination. This way, if you run 5 backups in overwrite mode and we started at the first slot each time, you would always write to tapes 1-5 in the destination and never touch the tapes in slots 6-10 (assuming a 10 tape destination). It’s similar to the reason that you don’t assign a drive in BRU Server if you have multiple drives. BRU Server keeps track of hours on a drive and round robins them to balance the drive utilization. Our goal with this design is to provide the longest life for both your media and you tape drives.
Sam – Michael is mostly correct on the other items. In your particular case, an automation solution would resolve all of what you are running into with tape swaps. However, when you select files for restore, the restore panel tells you which tape set volumes will be needed for the restore process. If you look at the “Selected Files/Paths” listbox, you will see the order of the tapes in the tape set that you will need to access before you start the restore.
There’s nothing wrong with your current workflow unless you were to change it soe that one disk’s data was on a tape set to itself.
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
I can state without a doubt that there is no performance difference in the LTO-6 drives. You are correct that there was a speed difference for the FH LTO-4 and LTO-5 types, but it was due to a tape spooling difference rather than a cache size difference.
If your backup app can keep the drive spinning, you’ll not see a difference with 6 FH vs HH. Plus, I don’t know of a source for a non-used FH drive any longer.
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!