Thunderbolt Stick Drive

If you don't have a computer with PCIe expansion slots – there are no easy and inexpensive ways of attaching an LTO tape drive to it.

• Flash Drive
• Thunderbolt Drive Enclosure
• Thunderbolt Stick Drive Usb
• Usb Stick Drive
• Thunderbolt External Hard Drives

For quite some time now I've been doing my backups (including all of the content on this website) by Tape. Why? Quite frankly I just like them. Doom xbox original. If like me you buy older generation drives second hand for personal backup, I find it actually works out cheaper than having say, two or three (or more) USB hard disks. The low cost of the media also allows me to have a history of my data (say, a copy from each year), because sometimes, things get lost or corrupted, I don't realise it, then end up overwriting a good (backup) copy of data with bad (or no) data.

There are other significant benefits of tape – particularly in the robustness and simplicity of the media. Tape media is purely mechanical (aside from the RFID chip on the side) meaning that there's no electronics which can be damaged. The physical spool of tape is also very robust, unlike the glass platters of a hard disk.

Thunderbolt 3 is the least-common external SSD interface, and SSDs that use it are often geared toward Mac users. You'll find Thunderbolt 3 on a resolutely speed-focused drives, such as the Samsung. USB C to Ethernet,LUOM Type C to Gigabit Ethernet with 3 USB 3.0 Aluminum Adapter, 10/100/1000 Mbps Thunderbolt 3 Compatible, for PC Laptop Windows macOs USB Flash Drives etc, Gray Limited time offer, ends 01/15. Backup your Mac with a portable or desktop hard drive. Safekeep all of your music, photographs, movies and more. Buy online with fast, free shipping.

The closest alternative to a Thunderbolt 3 drive is a USB-C version, as they also. Intel introduced the Thunderbolt platform in 2011 at a time when USB 3.0 was all the rage and could transfer data at speeds up to 5Gbps. Thunderbolt was capable of twice that, plus it could.

Dropped your tape and smashed it? Somehow managed to kill that RFID chip? No problem. Just buy another tape, undo the four Phillips screws on the bottom and transfer the tape spool to another shell, and you're back in business. Good luck doing anything like that on a hard disk!

Happened to be subject to a massive electrical surge or lightning strike while your one and only copy of data on a tape was in the drive? Once again, no problem. Tapes have no electrical connection to the drive whatsoever, even during operation.

When talking about backup, IT administrators often use the term 'air gap' meaning that data cannot be wiped out by a virus or other accidental software or power incidents. Tape, today, remains the undisputed the king of air gaps.

LTO Tape drives (these days) come with either Fiber Channel, or SAS interfaces – there are no other options. This makes them a little difficult to attached to (For example) a Mac, or any Laptop. Desktop PCs & Mac Pro's are not an issue because you'll likely have PCIe slots where a SAS or Fiber Channel host adapter can be installed.

I don't actually have any PCs with PCIe slots in them anymore, and haven't had for quite some time so have had to confront this issue myself.

Before we get into the topic of attaching drives, it may be worth considering the drives themselves – assuming you haven't already purchased one.

Despite a range of different brands, there are two manufacturers of LTO tape drives: HP & IBM. We can see this in the picture with our top drive having an IBM style blue button like what is found on their servers and desktop PCs, and the bottom drive featuring HP's corporate font under the LEDs.

Dell models feature a slightly different chassis however they are still IBM drives.

Both are very well engineered as you can imagine for the large price paid for these units purchased new.

There are some things to consider (in the context of tabletop drives) when choosing one over the other:

IBM Tabletop Drive

Pros:

• Slimmer more aesthetically pleasing design
• Good full featured LTFS implementation for Windows
• Easy single handed tape insertion – like a VCR
• Slightly more pleasing operational noises
• Very robust all metal chassis
• Easy to dismantle (four screws on the underside, cover slides off)

Cons:

• Extremely noisy high-RPM 40mm fan on rear, always runs and restricts the drive to server room use only
• Terrifying high pitched sound when loading tape
• Mine seems to jam during loading about 1 in 10 times – requiring a second attempt
• Drive is very long (340mm), may not fit on some shelves
• 'Soft' power switch. Power supply is still on even when drive is off
• An extra $1000 for an IBM branded one (grumble)

HP Tabletop Drive

Pros:

• 'Fat' design thermally superior to IBM's. Uses larger, quieter fan
• Fan is only on when tape is inserted, goes unto standby mode when empty (thanks to a fan output connector on the drive its self) – likely applies to LTO-6 drives and earlier only.
• Shorter than IBM drive (300mm)
• Full AC power switch on front (I think)

Cons:

• Ugly
• LTFS Implementation for Windows less featured than IBMs (LTO-6 and earlier). Depending on your use case you may also want to supplement it with this.
• Operational noises a little more irritating than the IBM drive
• LTO-6 and earlier drives have a 'flap' which has to be lifted up to insert a tape making it a two hand job. If you use the drive a lot – this is going to piss you off.
• Outer plastic chassis not as robust as IBM drive (there is also an inner metal chassis).
• Complicated chassis design must be dismantled in a very specific way to avoid breaking internal plastic clips.

Flash Drive

Side note: I have made several references to 'LTO-6 and earlier' here. This is because the last generation of drive made by HP was LTO-6. From 7 onward, HP drives are re-branded IBM drives deployed in HP's traditional black plastic chassis.

Some time ago a product existed to convert USB to SAS:

They originally sold for around US $250 but likely due to the decline of SAS usage in general, do not appear appear to be made anymore. They can still be found for sale, for typically very high ($500+) prices. If you can get your hands one for a good price, this may work out, but don't count on being able to get another.

Assuming you can obtain one of these rather exotic items, you would then need an internal SAS to SFF-8088 cable, bearing in mind that SFF-8088 carries 4 SAS lanes, you'd just connect your USB to SAS adapter to port 1 – which is what the tape drive will be internally connected to. This would be a workable setup – but a bit ugly.

Due to the obscene cost and obscurity – I would not recommend going down this path.

If you're not technical and/or not on a budget, there are a few ready-made Thunderbolt drives. These internally contain a PCIe to SAS host adapter as I demonstrate below. Expect to pay a $2000-3000 premium for this convenience. A product like this uses an ATTO or Highpoint SAS controller which is required for compatibility with macOS X – the primary target market for these products.

This will be a little cheaper than buying a pre-built drive but still a lot more expensive than the option below. You'll have to source the appropriate SAS cable. More about that below.

This is a far more sensible (and cheaper) option. Because Thunderbolt carries PCIe we can use (For example) an eGPU enclosure to carry a PCIe SAS Host adapter.

I personally use an LSI SAS9207-4i4e. The LSI SAS9207-8e (two external ports) would also be suitable, as would many others. I have chosen this because it is a fairly recent adapter, which also has the very same SFF-8088 connector found on the tape drive. I got this adapter off eBay for $30.

The full setup

To the left we have a PCIe Thunderbolt enclosure containing the Host Adapter. There are lots of Thunderbolt PCIe enclosures on the market, you can pretty much just pick the cheapest one as a SAS Host Adapter is not a very demanding card to install in one. Single slot enclosures seems to be the cheapest at around $200 at the time of writing.

To the right is the tape drive.

If we go down this path, in addition to only having spent $300 (excluding the cost of the drive), we also have the bonus of having a few new items that have other uses. For one the Thunderbolt enclosure can be used for other PCIe cards, also the SAS Host Adapter can be used as a very high performance connection for SATA hard disks too. There are many different cables and enclosures which can make use of this.

SAS cable selection

SFF-8088 cables come either x1 (one lane) or x4 (four lane) variants. A tape drive only has one lane so either an x1 or x4 cable will be OK. x1 cables are considerably thinner and lighter than x4 cables.

You can also buy fairly long SAS cables too. Bear in mind that tape drives are quite noisy, you may want to consider buying a longer cable (up to 10M / 33ft) so you can put the drive somewhere it's not going to irritate you.

There are multiple type of external SAS connector presently in use and these days SFF-8644 is beginning to replace SFF-8088 despite it still being common on tape drives. It's not a problem if you end up having to buy a SAS Host Adapter which has a SFF-8644 connector on it, you'll just have to buy a cable which has the appropriate connectors on each end.

Operating system (Windows/Linux)

On Windows 10 I did not have to install any drivers for the Thunderbolt enclosure or SAS Adapter – it all just worked.

The only driver I did have to install was for the tape drive its self.

Linux is even easier with all of the necessary drivers built into the kernel.

Operating system (macOS X)

There will not be any driver issues with either the Thunderbolt enclosure or the tape drive – they will work out of the box.

The issue arrives with the SAS host adapter. Unfortunately native SAS support is quite poor in macOS with only a handful of ATTO and Highpoint chipsets supported. It is these chipsets which are found in expensive ready-to-go solutions I have previously mentioned.

If you are lucky you might get one on a PCIe card for a decent price. Pictured above is an ATTO ExpressSAS H644 which you conceivably may be able to pick up second hand for a less than bank-balance-busting price but I wouldn't count on it. Windows server sftp client. Honestly, if you're an Apple person, it's likely not worth the hassle for you. Magstor's $5500 drive will work a treat.

As it happens I do own a Mac, and I've managed to pick one of these up for a very reasonable price second hand, so let's try it out…

The ATTO worked out of the box. I didn't have to install any additional driver packages. LTFS detected the drive and mounted it just fine. LTFS is not a very good 'experience' on macOS – and since experience the reason you have a Mac, you're probably going to want to look at some commercial backup software to run your tape drive, of which there are many choices. Freehandmx download free.

As was to be expected, my LSI adapter wasn't detected by macOS, nor are there any drivers available for download.

Hot plugging

I found that it all works like a charm. You can either hot plug the whole setup through the Thunderbolt cable, or you can just disconnect the SAS cable (or even power off the drive), as SAS is also hot-pluggable, if for example you use your SAS host adapter and PCIe enclosure for other things (as I do).

You could also substitute a PCIe SAS adapter for a Fiber Channel host adapter in your Thunderbolt enclosure if that's the kind of drive you happen to have. You can do your own research on that. This is going to be a lot more complicated but the advantage of this option is that you could have your tape drive a very long way from your PC.

For the most part, no. If you are starting with a SATA/eSATA controller, there is no way to adapt to SAS. You must start with a SAS controller. SAS controllers however, support either.

There are some scenarios where SATA to SAS/SFF adapters are useful – for example:

Let's say you have a SAS controller with a bunch of SATA HDDs attached via a SAS to SATA octopus cable, and you happened to have a spare port – it is possible to adapt that port back to SAS, to attach to a SAS tape drive.

Essentially – it doesn't matter if intermediate the cabling or connectors are SATA, just so long as you have SAS hardware at either end. SAS and SATA cables & connectors are eletrically the same i.e. 2x 100Ω differential pairs each – differing only mechanically.

It also doesn't matter that you are using a mix of devices on one host adapter – so long as you're not trying to put those devices into a single RAID volume – SAS controllers don't care.

Because the tape drive will only be using one port on the SFF-8088 connector, you can connect that one spare SAS port to port 1 on the adapter.

There are some products which adapt ExpressCard to PCIe which would allow a SAS adapter to be attached.

There are some examples of SAS ExpressCard adapters:

Very few true SAS ExpressCard adapters like the above were ever made. None are made anymore and anyone who has one may expect a high price for it.

Operating system (Windows/Linux)

On Windows 10 I did not have to install any drivers for the Thunderbolt enclosure or SAS Adapter – it all just worked.

The only driver I did have to install was for the tape drive its self.

Linux is even easier with all of the necessary drivers built into the kernel.

Operating system (macOS X)

There will not be any driver issues with either the Thunderbolt enclosure or the tape drive – they will work out of the box.

The issue arrives with the SAS host adapter. Unfortunately native SAS support is quite poor in macOS with only a handful of ATTO and Highpoint chipsets supported. It is these chipsets which are found in expensive ready-to-go solutions I have previously mentioned.

If you are lucky you might get one on a PCIe card for a decent price. Pictured above is an ATTO ExpressSAS H644 which you conceivably may be able to pick up second hand for a less than bank-balance-busting price but I wouldn't count on it. Windows server sftp client. Honestly, if you're an Apple person, it's likely not worth the hassle for you. Magstor's $5500 drive will work a treat.

As it happens I do own a Mac, and I've managed to pick one of these up for a very reasonable price second hand, so let's try it out…

The ATTO worked out of the box. I didn't have to install any additional driver packages. LTFS detected the drive and mounted it just fine. LTFS is not a very good 'experience' on macOS – and since experience the reason you have a Mac, you're probably going to want to look at some commercial backup software to run your tape drive, of which there are many choices. Freehandmx download free.

As was to be expected, my LSI adapter wasn't detected by macOS, nor are there any drivers available for download.

Hot plugging

I found that it all works like a charm. You can either hot plug the whole setup through the Thunderbolt cable, or you can just disconnect the SAS cable (or even power off the drive), as SAS is also hot-pluggable, if for example you use your SAS host adapter and PCIe enclosure for other things (as I do).

You could also substitute a PCIe SAS adapter for a Fiber Channel host adapter in your Thunderbolt enclosure if that's the kind of drive you happen to have. You can do your own research on that. This is going to be a lot more complicated but the advantage of this option is that you could have your tape drive a very long way from your PC.

For the most part, no. If you are starting with a SATA/eSATA controller, there is no way to adapt to SAS. You must start with a SAS controller. SAS controllers however, support either.

There are some scenarios where SATA to SAS/SFF adapters are useful – for example:

Let's say you have a SAS controller with a bunch of SATA HDDs attached via a SAS to SATA octopus cable, and you happened to have a spare port – it is possible to adapt that port back to SAS, to attach to a SAS tape drive.

Essentially – it doesn't matter if intermediate the cabling or connectors are SATA, just so long as you have SAS hardware at either end. SAS and SATA cables & connectors are eletrically the same i.e. 2x 100Ω differential pairs each – differing only mechanically.

It also doesn't matter that you are using a mix of devices on one host adapter – so long as you're not trying to put those devices into a single RAID volume – SAS controllers don't care.

Because the tape drive will only be using one port on the SFF-8088 connector, you can connect that one spare SAS port to port 1 on the adapter.

There are some products which adapt ExpressCard to PCIe which would allow a SAS adapter to be attached.

There are some examples of SAS ExpressCard adapters:

Very few true SAS ExpressCard adapters like the above were ever made. None are made anymore and anyone who has one may expect a high price for it.

Most products resembling the above are 4x SATA controllers with an SFF-8088 connectors, which is of no use for tape drives.

The adapters and cables in this article work with these Mac computers and iPad Pro devices:

• Mac models that have Thunderbolt 3 ports. These ports support both Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C connections.
  
• Mac models that have a USB-C port. This port supports USB-C connections.
• iPad Pro models that have a USB-C port. This port supports USB-C connections.

To find the right cable or adapter for your Mac or iPad Pro, use the information below to identify the connector on the end of the cable coming from your display, hard drive, camera, hub, or other device. Check the end meant to plug into your Mac or iPad Pro.

Thunderbolt 3

If you're using an Apple Thunderbolt 3 cable or other Thunderbolt 3 cable with your display or other device, it will connect to your Mac without an adapter.

The Apple Pro Display XDR and LG UltraFine 5K Display use Thunderbolt 3.

USB-C

If you're using a mophie USB-C Cable with USB-C Connector or other USB-C cable with your device, it will connect to your Mac or iPad Pro without an adapter.

The LG UltraFine 4K Display uses USB-C.

USB-A

If you're using a USB-A cable with your device, use the Apple USB-C to USB Adapter, the Apple USB-C Digital AV Multiport Adapter, the Apple USB-C VGA Multiport Adapter, or another USB-C to USB-A adapter to connect your device to your Mac or iPad Pro.

To charge an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch from a Thunderbolt 3 or USB-C port without one of these adapters, you can use the Apple USB-C to Lightning Cable instead.

Ethernet

If you're using an Ethernet cable with your device, use a third-party USB-C to Ethernet adapter, such as the Belkin USB-C to Gigabit Ethernet Adapter.

Thunderbolt or Thunderbolt 2

If you're using a Thunderbolt or Thunderbolt 2 cable with a Thunderbolt display or other device, use the Apple Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 Adapter.

This is the correct adapter for the Apple Thunderbolt Display.

Thunderbolt and Thunderbolt 2 are not the same as Mini DisplayPort . They have the same shape, but use different symbols on the cable and port.

Autotune evo vst fl studio 12. Mini DisplayPort

If you're using a Mini DisplayPort cable with a Mini DisplayPort display, use a third-party USB-C to Mini DisplayPort adapter. Check with its manufacturer for compatibility with your Mac and display model.

Slots garden login. This is the correct solution for the Apple LED Cinema Display.

Mini DisplayPort is not the same as Thunderbolt or Thunderbolt 2 . They have the same shape, but use different symbols on the cable and port.

DisplayPort

Thunderbolt Drive Enclosure

If you're using a DisplayPort cable with your display, use a third-party USB-C to DisplayPort adapter or cable, such as the Moshi USB-C to DisplayPort Cable.

HDMI

Thunderbolt Stick Drive Usb

If you're using an HDMI cable with your display, use the Apple USB-C Digital AV Multiport Adapter or a third-party USB-C to HDMI adapter or cable.

Usb Stick Drive

VGA

Thunderbolt External Hard Drives

If you're using a VGA cable with your display, use the Apple USB-C VGA Multiport Adapter. Or use a third-party USB-C to VGA adapter, such as the Belkin USB-C to VGA Adapter.

DVI

If you're using a DVI cable with your display, use a third-party USB-C to DVI adapter or cable. Check with its manufacturer for compatibility with your Mac and display model.

Learn more

• You can use your USB-C Power Adapter and charge cable with any Thunderbolt 3 or USB-C port on your Mac or iPad Pro.
• If you have an Apple TV connected to your TV, projector, or other display, you can use AirPlay to wirelessly stream video to that display, or extend the desktop of your primary display.
• Learn about using external monitors with your Mac.
• Learn more about using the USB-C port on your iPad Pro.