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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-6 Drives Enter Engineering Test

Tim Jones

Tim Jones

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Hi Folks,

We knew they were coming and the first LTO-6 engineering samples are finally here. We're testing them in our labs under OS X, Linux, and Solaris and the preliminary results are quite impressive.

With no coding changes to the current BRU PE and BRU Server platforms on OS X 10.7.5 and 10.8.2, we are seeing consistent performance numbers of:


:yesnod:
192MB/sec Write
195MB/sec Read​
:yesnod:


Additionally, seek and positioning commands are around 50% faster than with LTO-5, so locating and restoring your data (at least with BRU) is even faster.

Our data test set is 1.2TB of 2K and 5K R3D files, PreRes 444 and 442 files, MP2 SD, WAV, and MP3 audio files on a 4 channel RAID-0 stripe of 16 7200RPM disks connected to an ATTO H680 - pretty standard stuff for the crowd around here.

Don't have much more to share, and pricing hasn't been firmed up, but we'll know more in a few weeks as the expected ship start is in mid-January.

Tim
 
Hooray! :)


Do the new drive mechanisms also have faster positioning with LTO-5 tapes?
 
Would be interesting to see. I've found my HP 3000 LTO-5 unit to be a bit faster handling LTO-4 media than the HP 1760 LTO-4 unit.
 
Great news!!
 
Zack CC said:
Time to get excited about tape again... XD
Click to expand...


Not until they ditch the SAS connection. USB3 and Thunderbolt are fast enough for these guys.
 
A bit more LTO-6 detail -

Tapes have a native capacity of 2.5TB, so (as I mention above), around 3.75 hours to fill a tape if you're using BRU on a Mac or Linux system.

Using tar on a Linux system (Xeon 2.8GHz 4-core, 16GB, XFS filesystem on the array) topped out at around 123MB/sec by forcing a 1MB blocksize (-b 2048). We're trying to see if there's a way to improve that, but this may be a top end limit for gnutar and bsdtar.

More as it becomes available.
 
No Native Thunderbolt or USB 3...

No Native Thunderbolt or USB 3...

Jarek Zabczynski said:
Not until they ditch the SAS connection. USB3 and Thunderbolt are fast enough for these guys.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, this means that you will remain tapeless :sad: . The development overhead for creating a USB-3 or Thunderbolt native drive costs more than total cost of purchasing one of the various Thunderbolt bridge units and just connecting the already available SAS drive. Additionally, since there would be no other gain from a native device, the manufacturers have let us know in no uncertain terms that such an option will never happen.

Tim
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
Do the new drive mechanisms also have faster positioning with LTO-5 tapes?
Click to expand...

It turns out that the positioning is a bit faster, but the transfer rates still top out at 140MB/sec (.5TB/hour).

The big difference that you see with LTO-4 media in the LTO-5 drive is in that the LTO-4 half-height drives were limited in their write speed to 80MB/sec. When you then use that same LTO-4 tape in an LTO-5 drive, you see the full potential of 120MB/sec for LTO-4.

Tim
 
Tim Jones said:
That's GB, not TB, so 12GB/min and 680GB/hour or around 3.75 hours to fill a 2.5TB tape.
Click to expand...
That's incredibly good news, Tim. I take it read/restore times are the same or better?

How do the costs of LTO-6 compare to LTO-5?
 
Atto Thunderstream

Atto Thunderstream

I am hoping to use my Atto Thunderstream device to connect to LTO Tape drive. I am currently using one of it's ports for a SATA RAID. Tim, I will connect with you soon to check back on this. I am in the market for 2 rack mount systems but will wait for LTO 6. I am currently working with rented Cache A drives.
 
Last edited:
Tim Jones said:
Unfortunately, this means that you will remain tapeless :sad: . The development overhead for creating a USB-3 or Thunderbolt native drive costs more than total cost of purchasing one of the various Thunderbolt bridge units and just connecting the already available SAS drive. Additionally, since there would be no other gain from a native device, the manufacturers have let us know in no uncertain terms that such an option will never happen.

Tim
Click to expand...
'

Rubbish, there's a lot to gain. Portability for one. Needing to have a card to connect to these guys is pretty limiting. Sure, PCI Expansion units with SAS cards in them work, but those types of solution are clunky and cumbersome. The technology is here to leave the SAS interface behind for stuff like this. Thunderbolt and USB3 tape drives seems like a no brainer.
 
Jarek Zabczynski said:
'

Rubbish, there's a lot to gain. Portability for one. Needing to have a card to connect to these guys is pretty limiting. Sure, PCI Expansion units with SAS cards in them work, but those types of solution are clunky and cumbersome. The technology is here to leave the SAS interface behind for stuff like this. Thunderbolt and USB3 tape drives seems like a no brainer.
Click to expand...

jarek,
could you suggest some models please?
thanks
 
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