LTO-5 Help

[Joe Pontecorvo]

I have recently purchased an HP Ultrium 3000 external SAS LTO-5 Tape drive.
I'm using a MAXPower RAID Mini-SAS PCI card in a Early 2008 Mac Pro running OS 10.7.
I have installed all the drivers, but the "HP StoreOpen Standalone" software cannot find my tape drive.

I am wondering if the MAXPower SAS card is the problem. Has anyone used this configuration?

Thanks,
Joe

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Good chance it is the card. Does the card show up in your system profile and show the LTO drive as a connected device?

[Joe Pontecorvo]

No it does not. What SAS card do you recommend ?

[Joe Pontecorvo]

This is the card I am using: MAXPower RAID mini-SAS gG-2e http://eshop.macsales.com/item/NewerTech/MXPRMS6G2E/

Any reason why it should not work with LTO-5 HP tape drive?

[Jeff Kilgroe]

No it does not. What SAS card do you recommend ?

If the card does not show up in your system profile when you click on SAS in the device list on the left, then you probably don't have drivers installed properly or at all or something else is amiss with the drivers. If the card shows, but does not show the HP tape drive connected, then they may just not be compatible. Which isn't uncommon, especially on OSX as SAS drivers from most vendors seem to be rather lacking.

ATTO H680 would be the recommended card here. It's $100 more and has no onboard RAID functionality (the R680 is the RAID version and goes for about $1K), but it's hands down the best dual external port (8 channel) 6Gbps SAS/SATA card out there. Mac bootable too, you can boot from eSATA and SAS drives connected to it. :)

Ooops, wait a minute, you have an '08 Mac Pro. Hmmm... Actually that's still the card I would recommend and it will work great. Just be aware that it's a PCIe v2.0 card and the '08 Mac Pro only has PCIe v1.1 for slots 3 and 4. The two X16 slots (1 & 2) are PCIe 2.0. You would still install it in either slot 3 or 4 and it would run at 1/4 of it's potential speed, but it's still plenty fast enough to handle the tape drive and an eSATA drive or two -- at the same time. That could be part of the problem with your card from OWC -- it's also a PCIe v2.0 card and it may not be playing nice with the 1.x slot. They're supposed to be backward compatible, but sometimes it doesn't work as we would like.

Isn't the HP software only for Windows, or do they have a Mac version now? Either way, and I know it's going to cost another chunk of change, take a look at BRU-PE from Tolis Group. That's what most of us are running around here with these HP LTO-4 or 5 units. It's the best option going for the Mac right now. www.productionbackup.com for more details.

[Joe Pontecorvo]

Thanks Jeff, It's the later - the card shows up, but not reading the HP tape drive. I think your right, I have it in Slot 4 and it may not be working well in 1.x slot.
The HP software I downloaded is "HP StoreOpen Standalone - LTFS" software for mac. But i also downloaded free trial of BRU-PE.

But I am thinking now the card is simply not reading the Tape drive and part of the problem may be the 1.x slot. At this stage I am really pushing the limits of this Early 2008 model with all the slots bursting at the seams. I would like to upgrade, but waiting to see what the future holds, if anything for the Mac Pro line.

Jeff, what system are you currently using?

[Jeff Kilgroe]

If the card shows up, then it's drivers should be loaded fine. I doubt the issue is the 1.x slot at this point since the system reports the card. More than likely, it's that the card and the tape drive don't get along, which is very common, especially on OSX. What it comes down to is these tape drives are finicky and only like to "hook up" with a host adapter that will talk to them the way they like. Under OSX, most SAS and SCSI cards have very restrictive drivers, which don't like to adapt themselves to a multitude of connection parameters. SAS cards from LSI, 3Ware and many other lesser brands, just don't work with these HP and Quantum tape drives. Hence one of the many reasons so many of us running tape systems on OSX these days are using the ATTO cards.

Currently I only have one Mac Pro system -- a 2009 8-core. I've had others, but have got rid of them... I had a 2010 12-core tower that I just sold a couple weeks back. I would have preferred to keep that system rather than the '09 one, but it fetched a lot more in resale value and I had an eager buyer ready to take it off my hands. I'm expecting a new offering from Apple to show up in April, along with the new Xeon workstations from other PC makers. Although that may not happen and Apple might choose to hold off until July or August and launch new systems with the new version of OSX. Kinda hard to predict what Apple is going to do and what the final specs will be.

[Jason Enzer]

joe,

i had that very setup and i found somewhere in the documentation that the pci-e sas card included with the kit ( LSI card right?? ) is not mac supported. there are some 3rd party drivers out there but i had flaky at best performance. i ended up getting an ATTO H380 card and that did the trick...

[Joe Pontecorvo]

Hi Jason, Thanks for this. I think that's the problem. I think I need to go with a new pci card- I'll try the ATTO H380.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

The H680 is the newer 6Gbps model and can often be had for cheaper these days. It's PCIe 2.0 as well, meaning it's more future-proof. It works great in the 1.x slots in an '08 Mac Pro too.