DVDAfterEdit, and now BluStreak

The ATTO UL5D, ATTO 4.20 driver, Mac Pro, and Leopard 10.5.1 are working fine with the all four of our tape drives connected at the same time, including the DLT8000, on both DVDAfterEdit and the new tape utility which we are developing.

You should probably wait on Leopard for PPC systems with regular PCI slots and the ATTO UL3D or UL3S card until we can do more testing. We don't have a G5 with PCI-X or PCI-Express slots to test with, and will have to rely on your feedback for those configurations.

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We are making great progress on the new Tape Utility for HDAfterEdit. At this time both DVDAfterEdit ME and the new utility, titled DDPAfterBurner, are working without any hardware errors in the configuration described below, with two tape drives installed on separate channels and woriking simultaneously and independently. We have also ordered a DLT8000 to make sure that we can read any tapes that might be presented to us.

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After posting this, we have discovered more information:

Some of the earlier problems were caused by trying to read tapes written on a DLT8000 using a DLT7000. This problem can be overcome when writing the tapes by choosing the output mode with the tape drive buttons, or overriding the settings by issuing tape commands. We will investigate these options further.

We are writing a new stand-alone universal binary utility for copying DDP images to and from tape. This way DVDAE can be used to create the DDP image, and the utility can handle writing and verifying the tape. We will be concentrating my efforts on this avenue. The new utility will be used in conjunction with HDAfterEdit for DLT operation, rather than having that function built-in to HDAE.

There may still be problems on the Mac Pro when hooking up multiple drives. We will continue investigating.

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I received my ATTO UL5D SCSI card today and it worked right out of the box with DVDAfterEdit Mastering Edition. Here is a description of my configuration and parameters.

Processor: Mac Pro 2 x 2.66 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon
Memory: 4 GB 667 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM
Extension: ATTOExpressPCI4 version 4.2.0 downloaded from www.attotech.com

ATTO UL5D Full Height (The low profile does not fit in a Mac Pro).

I installed the UL5D in Slot 3 and configured it for 4 lanes/ 8 lanes. (Faster might confuse the slow tape drive, but going down to 1 lane wasn't necessary). When I installed the card and booted, OS X automatically brought up the PCI Express lane configuration utility.

I downloaded the latest driver (above) from attotech and installed it. Didn't check the firmware or use any of their other software. The system profiler shows:

Name: scsi
Type: SCSI Bus Controller
Bus: PCI
Slot: Slot-3@5,4,0 (the card is dual-channel, the other channel shows Slot-3@5,4,1)
Vendor ID: 0x117c
Device ID: 0x0030
Subsystem Vendor ID: 0x117c
Subsystem ID: 0x8027
Revision ID: 0x0008

Probably the most important item in any SCSI installation is good cables and active terminator. I use:

http://www.computercablesource.com/

They are close to me but ship world-wide, have excellent quality, prices, and availability.

For UL5D, UL4S/D, or UL3S/D to DLT7000 or DLT8000 use this cable:

Scsi Cable - VHDCI-68 male to HD68 male - U320 LVD/SE/HVD - 003 foot
Part#: SCSU-320L-003 - $29

I never use DLT4000 or older, all of mine broke, they are too slow, and often the firmware is out of date. I also use DLT IV tapes, DLT III tapes are too slow.

I use this for my single-ended DLT7000 drives:

SCSI Terminator - High density 68M Active with LED
Part#: SCST-5420
$15

Most drives are single-ended. It is possible to buy an LVD (low-voltage differential) drive, they would use this:

SCSI Terminator - High density 68M Low Voltage Differential, Ultra320 (LVD/SE) - External Multi-mode 320 MBPS - Beige with Dual State LED
Part#: SCST-5448-BGE
$18

Or the black version of the same thing.

Do not buy an HVD (high-voltage diffrential) drive, or you would fry your ATTO card.

The ATTO cards are as follows:

PCI - UL3S, UL3D
PCI-X - US4S, UL4D
PCIExpress - UL5D

Do not buy other brands than ATTO, Firewire to SCSI, or USB to SCSI, or older ATTO cards, they mostly don't work. But if you already own something, go ahead and give it a try.

The ATTO iSCSI solution (Ethernet to SCSI) works fine after John Brisbin pointed out their driver bug, but is expensive.

I once had 6 drives installed and running overlapped with no loss in performance, in DVDAE Mastering Edition on my G5 1.0 GHz and ATTO UL3D. Some of them were the slower drives that have since died, but I had at least two DLT7000,s and one slow drive running on a single channel.

DVDAE will write both layers of a DL DDP at the same time, one each to two drives.

Regards,

Larry