LTO-6 Drives Enter Engineering Test

[Bob Moore]

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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.

Interesting...

Here is another view related to the bandwidth.:

http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/292/1445


Bob

 

[Tim Jones]

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.

Unfortunately, there's nothing for the manufacturers to gain. The cost of implementing Thunderbolt and maintaining an entire secondary manufacturing line is just not cost effective if the unit delivery isn't in the 100.000's of units per year. As for the Thunderbolt to PCIe chassis being cumbersome, they are no more so than any other external device. Since the Thunderbolt connectivity to so simple to implement, it's just one more cable.

As for gain, I was speaking in terms of performance. 140MB/sec is the native speed of LTO-5 and LTO-6 is 160MB/sec. Far below the performance of a SAS to PCIe bridge requirement.

I understand where you're coming from, and I'd love to see at least USB-3 native LTO-4 drives, but the manufacturers are hampered by the expense of the interface components, new development and design, and what they see as a niche market.

Tim

 

[Tim Jones]

LTO-6 is finally real!

LTO-6 is finally real!

The LTO-6 Drives and media are Ready!

Or to quote an old U.S. commercial "Its soup!"

Look for announcements from the various vendors throughout the month.

TOLIS Group will begin shipping the first week of January.

Tim

 

[Tim Jones]

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.

This will definitely work. We've tested with the ThunderStream and were able to stream from an attached RAID-5 expander chassis (24 drives) over the same ThunderStream at over 192MB/sec to the LTO-6 drive using BRU under OS X 10.7.5, and 10.8.2 (pretty similar numbers on Linux and Solaris as well).

Tim

 

[Tim Jones]

I was about to purchase an LTO-5 system.
shall I wait then Tim?

Hi Shapour,

None of us were expecting things to be ready this soon, so in your case, waiting may have paid off :yesnod:

You should be good to go on ordering an LTO-6 solution from most vendors.

TIm

 

[Frank Cueto]

Tim, I just bought a lto5 from your people two weeks ago. Any idea of what I could do to upgrade to lto6? Besides buying a whole new drive and eating the one i JUST acquired?

thanks

-F

 

[Tim Jones]

Hi Frank,

We didn't expect the LTO-6 to launch this early, so sorry that we didn't steer you towards it. Contact your sales rep and we'll see what we can do for you.

Tim