New LTO4-A drive

[Mark L. Pederson]

We had a phone conference with the guys from Cache-A yesterday -

Features on this new product are stunning - priced same as original price of LT03A drive.

http://cache-a.com/products.php

There are several key features NOT on their website yet which include:

* Built-in searchable database – the drive remembers all of the tapes it has seen.
* Network file system with mountable volumes – our tape drives now appear as a networked hard drive via NFS, SMB, or AFP.
* 4 new interfaces – USB, Firewire, PCI ExpressCard, eSATA let you plug many new media type directly into the drive. All interfaces are not on all models.
* Automatic timed backups of select network directories.
* Cartridge spanning – allows keeping data sets of any size in 800GB multiples.
* Fully multi-user for workgroups.
* Standard TAR format so tapes can be read on any LTO-4.
* 800GB/cartridge and greater than 50MB/s transfer rates.

VERY exciting product.

[Curran Giddens]

Yes, very exciting indeed!

[Chris Parker]

This sounds nice. I especially like the part about being able to be read by any lto4 device. This was an issue with lto3a. I still considering getting out of the a series and into cheaper, industry standard lto4.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Excellent report, Mark!

The additional connectivity and the TAR format have me sold as long as their pricing isn't way out of line. I'm curious about their "A-Series" naming and that one of their founders was formerly with Quantum. Reports are that they have licensed the A-Series specs, etc. from Quantum. So it's odd they would pursue a TAR-based format readable by other drives.

Did they happen to say if it's possible to use these drives as conventional tape systems? In terms of standard tape device interface with software like BRU, etc..?

As for using the tapes on other drives, a lot of people here have standardized their OSX backups lately on LTO-4 with BRU software. On the Mac Tolis Group also offers Tolis Tape Tools as part of BRU-PE. TTT will let you work with TAR arcives.

[Matt Gottshalk]

http://reduser.net/forum/showpost.ph...&postcount=143

Yup, I heard from my local dealer the same thing:

"Rumor is that it will be bundled with some version of both HD-Logger and the Pictron stuff. We've had reasonable success with installing the LTO3a's, both the desktop and 16-tape SuperLoader units. There'll be no SuperLoader on the new 4a stuff. Mark Ostlund heads up Cache-a; he had been product manager for the 3a at Quantum, but left and licensed the rights to the new 800G/tape systems. The software is smart enough to keep track of media on multiple bar-coded tapes, so finding stuff 6 months down the road should be a snap."

Should be under 8K.

[C.H.Haskell]

I like the sound of this rig, thanks for sharing Mark.

[nicolas2ct]

what is the price ? and availability ?
THANKS

[Matt Gottshalk]

Under 8K.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Under $8K for what? And if that means $7995 for a single HH unit with eSATA or gig-E connectivity, then I'll respectfully pass. For the same money, I can equip 2 workstations/servers with their own LTO-4 SAS unit and software and still have enough left over to buy some tapes... like a 40 of them if I choose HP units with ATTO contollers or 50 tapes if I go the Quantum + LSI route.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Lessons that these guys could learn from Quantum... Apparently from Mark's post above, they have learned some of these lessons.

Multiple interface options. eSATA is a good thing.

Ability to read their format in other LTO-4 drives (Quantum's LTO-3A tapes use a proprietary data format)

Hopefully, Cache-A will make their units actually work properly with an FTP client. Quantum's FTP interface is still incomplete and buggy as of 2 months ago.

Pricing... The Quantum 3A desktop unit, and even more so the SuperLoader-3A would have sold like hotcakes if the pricing were reasonable. But it's not. Before switching to LTO-4, I build a SFF PC with internal RAID and a Quantum LTO-3 HH tape unit. It was only about 10% larger than the Quantum-3A and I could mimic all the same features, plus it was a lot faster. Oh, it also worked as a nice DIT box for direct offload of footage with the ability to lay off to tape or write to Blu-Ray / DVD at the end of the shoot. And it would run Redcine. ...it was half the price of the cheapest LTO-3A unit I could find at the time. I sold it to another fellow reduser, who is still using it with great success. I'm thinking of building another for myself, but I'm kinda set in my current workflow ways here for now. Maybe if I pick up some bigger jobs as DIT I'll do it and put an LTO-4 in it next time around and solid-state storage.

These are the units that every industry needing a robust and convenient backup solution has been waiting for! These are not niche products, no need to price and market them as such.