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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

LTO-3 still the way to go?

Offhollywood said:
Cable comes with the unit - I have used our 600A direct to MacBook Pro - no problems. I LOVE the 600A - we use it every day - it is fantastic.
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Mark,
Is there a reason you decided to back-up in the field as opposed to back at the studio?
 
Okay, so fairly similar to our plan then. Bring back a RAID 1 drive then copy to the SAN. The SAN is RAID 5 so at this point we would have to lose both RAID 1 drives and 2 SAN drives to lose data. The SAN is backed up overnight to LTO-4 tapes.

We had some discussions about Keeping the R3D files for each project on their own tape, but we decided against it in the end. Once a project comes off the SAN it will probably go onto a tape as a project archive so that any point of the project can be rebuilt, but all the renders aren't kept.

The Netvault software we use isn't drag and drop. It's designed for backing from multiple clients. I think we went for Netvault as Retrospect didn't support LTO-4 at the time.
 
are you guys keeping the camera generated proxies within the shot folder or are you just archiving the .3rd file?
Wouldn't it make sense to keep the small ones on hdd in a database with a path to the raw file? What would be the mac database to do that?
axel
 
Evin Grant said:
Jeff I believe that Gig-E is a single port. At least it seems so on the diagram of the actual unit from Quanutm.
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Sorry if I wasn't clear, Evin. Yes Gig-E is a single port. I was saying that the Mac Pro includes two Gigabit ethernet ports, not that the interface needs two ports. :)

And yes, that Quantum unit does have Gigabit Ethernet interface for data transfer, but I was talking about LTO-3 drives. EDIT > .... EDIT Again> Nevermind. Anyone know of an LTO-3/4 drive that has Gig-E? I would prefer to stick with LTO vs. going to SDLT.

The Gig-E interface is ideal for field use. As of the last time I looked, no one was making an ExpressCard34 SCSI adapter that supported anything better than SCSI-2, which will not work (or at least not very well) for these newer tape systems. Hopefully that has changed in the past month or so. We keep hearing rumors of eSATA and SAS interfaces coming on tape systems, yet manufacturers are not actually producing these yet.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
The Gig-E interface is ideal for field use. As of the last time I looked, no one was making an ExpressCard34 SCSI adapter that supported anything better than SCSI-2, which will not work (or at least not very well) for these newer tape systems. Hopefully that has changed in the past month or so. We keep hearing rumors of eSATA and SAS interfaces coming on tape systems, yet manufacturers are not actually producing these yet.
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Quantum makes the DLT V4 SATA drive, but with 160gb tapes, it wouldn't work great with the RED 320gb drives. The tapes are also more expensive for what you get than LTO-3 tapes.

I've been waiting to see a ExpressCard34 SCSI interface. So far, the Magma ExpressBox is the only option that would work - which is supposed to work fine, but throws another $1,000 down the drain. http://www.magma.com/products/pciexpress/expressbox1/
 
mcgeedigital said:
There is a also a scsi to firewire adapter for those not wanting to go backward with the SCSI interface:


http://www.pc-pitstop.com/scsi_ide_adapters/FR1SX.asp
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These were discussed months ago. When a tape drive mechanism doesn't receive enough data to write at full speed it mechanically stops, backs up, waits for data, and starts to write again. With these firewire adaptors, you're likely to break the mechanism, it will probably take 12 hours to write to one tape, and the likelyhood of errors being written to tape is huge.
 
Cinewalt said:
These were discussed months ago. When a tape drive mechanism doesn't receive enough data to write at full speed it mechanically stops, backs up, waits for data, and starts to write again. With these firewire adaptors, you're likely to break the mechanism, it will probably take 12 hours to write to one tape, and the likelyhood of errors being written to tape is huge.
Click to expand...

Cinewalt is correct. That adapter has a max transfer rate of 20 MB's, but the LTO-3 spec is 80 MB's a second. In reality, wouldn't you have to have at least Firewire 800 to get those speeds? (Not that I've actually seen firewire 800 do 80 MB's a second.)

I am going to look for more SCSI cases this afternoon to see if I can find one that will fit a half hight LTO-3 drive.

Matthew
 
Do you think I should expect some upgrades of these units like the 600A at NAB? Not that I think it needs upgrading but I have been wanting to pick up a 600A for a long time and I am hoping it comes down in price perhaps post NAB, I could be dreaming.
 
Okay, this is what I've found so far for using a LTO-3 drive with a Mac desktop like the MacPro.

There is only one SCSI Ultra320 card maker for osx that I can find, and it's Atto Tech. Their UL5D Lower Profile card seems to be the cheapest from them at $400-$450. (http://www.attotech.com/ultra5Dlowpro.html)

Here is the LTO-3 Drive that I found:
http://www.coastalmicrosupply.com/h...trium-920-lto3-internal-tape-drive-p1784.html At $1635, it's about the cheapest I could find for a drive, either full or half hight.

And lastly, it looks like this case would work: http://www.computercablesource.com/...lvd-ultra-320-ribbon-cable-aluminum-1247.html It's $78 for the case and then $18 for the terminator that you probably need.

Total: Around $2200 for the hardware...then you have to add in the software...sigh...

Do you all this hardware would work together?

Matthew
 
macville said:
Okay, this is what I've found so far for using a LTO-3 drive with a Mac desktop like the MacPro.

There is only one SCSI Ultra320 card maker for osx that I can find, and it's Atto Tech. Their UL5D Lower Profile card seems to be the cheapest from them at $400-$450. (http://www.attotech.com/ultra5Dlowpro.html)

Here is the LTO-3 Drive that I found:
http://www.coastalmicrosupply.com/h...trium-920-lto3-internal-tape-drive-p1784.html At $1635, it's about the cheapest I could find for a drive, either full or half hight.

And lastly, it looks like this case would work: http://www.computercablesource.com/...lvd-ultra-320-ribbon-cable-aluminum-1247.html It's $78 for the case and then $18 for the terminator that you probably need.

Total: Around $2200 for the hardware...then you have to add in the software...sigh...

Do you all this hardware would work together?

Matthew
Click to expand...

That looks at lot like what I was planning on using, the only difference was that I was probably going to opt for the external ultrium-920 and skip the potentially messy SCSI housing issues that might occur with the internal 920.

One question, what kind of software would people recommend for archiving to an LTO-3 system on OSX?
 
Ed Watkins said:
That looks at lot like what I was planning on using, the only difference was that I was probably going to opt for the external ultrium-920 and skip the potentially messy SCSI housing issues that might occur with the internal 920.

One question, what kind of software would people recommend for archiving to an LTO-3 system on OSX?
Click to expand...

I had thought about that also, but they are around $2200 and then you still have to buy the friggin SCSI card that's $450! I'm wondering if other SCSI 320 PCI-e card would work in the mac? It seems like somewhere I saw that the Atto card didn't need drivers on the mac (or maybe that was another one of their cards.)

Matthew
 
We use an Atto SCSI card for our LTO-4. I'm pretty sure it requires drivers. We have had issues which we believe were to do with the SCSI card. We had kernel panics, but only over 100MB/s. We believe that a firmware update for the card fixed this. Our 5 TB backup runs over the weekend so, fingers crossed, all will be well on Monday morning.
 
This is a great thread everyone! Keep it going!

Personally, I think I'm going to go with the 600A LTO3 drive from Quantum with the Ethernet interface. I have a small shop and the flexibility of being able to do backups on laptops as well as the desktops without having to have a SCSI card is important to me. Having the built-in FTP server on the 600A and being able to 'drag and drop' files onto the tape instead of having to use Retrospect is cool as well.
 
feed17 said:
I think this one has Gig-E.

http://www.quantum.com/Products/TapeDrives/LTOUltrium/LTO-3A/Index.aspx
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Yep. An LTO-3 version of the 600A SDLT. There you go. I missed it somehow. Looks like a much better option than going SCSI if a single slot unit will work (and it probably will for most).

Quantum also has the drive in a SAS interface module too. Oooh. TheNerds.net has the SAS model for less than $2K. I'm still trying to find someone who actually has the Gig-E model listen in their online store.

If I go with a SCSI system, I'm really starting to like the Exabyte / Tandberg Magnum 1x7 LTO-3. I can get it complete with PCI-e SCSI card for $3500. The LTO-4 version is tempting, but it's $1800 more and the tapes are $97 each.
 
remember - the A series drives (to my knowledge) are NOT compatible with non A series - and the A series shows you EACH and EVERY file in the directory - exactly like FINDER - so you can see and pull off ONE DPX frame for example - I am not sure if you can do that with a non A series drive - I don't know for sure - because we have the 600A and I have never used a non-A series unit - anybody care to confirm this?
 
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