Thunderbolt bus going deaf

[dgrizzle]

I've just updated all my hardware, including a new MacPro, a new iMac, each with a Promise Technology Pegasus 2 RAID. I am trying to backup to a HP LTO-6 autoloader connected via an ATTO ThunderLink.

 

Setup was fairly easy. I had to update firmware in the ATTO ThunderLink in order to recognize the HP autoloader in Retrospect.

 

Initial backup of terabytes of data is a beast.

 

Initial run and a subsequent attempt have ultimately failed with Retrospect throwing a communication error. After the first failure, I noticed that the Thunderbolt bus seemed to be deaf. There was no activity on the Pegasus drive, and when I double clicked the Pegasus from the Mac desktop, it opened a blank Finder window but the drive was not accessed (no activity on drive's LEDs) and the window never drew.

 

The communications error occurred about 12 hours into the backup, after over 4TB of data had been saved to tape.

 

A simple attempt to reboot the Mac locked up on the spinning beach ball, so I was forced to hold down the power key to shut down the Mac. Everything came back normally, and I restarted Retrospect and resumed the backup.

 

Again, this time after about 18 hours, Retrospect has sent me an email indicating a communication error.

 

Retrospect never crashed or became unresponsive in either incident, but reported the communication error via email both times.

 

Unfortunately, I am on a two week vacation out of state and cannot restart the backup until early next month.

 

Is there a known problem with Thunderbolt?

 

FWIW - my current config is with the Pegasus drive attached directly to the iMac, and the ThunderLink daisy chained off the Pegasus. My next step will be to experiment with chaining order, or to home run each device to a separate Thunderbolt port on the iMac.