- Has anyone else seen poor Ultrium Tape backup performance?
- Posted by John Dougrez-Lewis on June 13th, 2004
Hi,
I'm fed up with DDS-4 taking 12 hours with 5 tape changes needed to
backup my 70GB of data.
As a way out of this, I've been looking at getting an Ultrium-1 or -2
tape drive, rated at 108GB/hr and 216GB/hr at 2:1 compression.
I've tested an HP Ultrium 230e drive with Windows2003 NTBackup and was
dismayed to see that, even with compression enabled, it took 100s to
backup 1GB and then another 50s to read it back to verify it.
This works out about 10MB/s - only a third of what the tape drive is
rated as being capable of and barely twice as fast as my existing HP
DDS-4 setup.
The Ultrium was running on a dedicated Adaptec Ultra 160 card.
The HDD is a fast 147GB Seagate ST3156807LW connected to a dedicated
Ultra 320 card running in a PCI-X slot. The system is an Intel Dual XEON
Vero Beach SE7505VB2 with 2GB RAM.
The Ultrium drive was a second user unit being sold on e-Bay. In the
end, because of the continual write errors, I didn't go for it and would
now be inclined to be a new one instead.
Whilst the HP Ultrium drives are relatively expensive, they have really
appealing performance specs.
But are these figures really achievable in the real world?
And are these drives mechanically reliable?
Regards,
John Lewis
- Posted by Mal Osborne on June 14th, 2004
Sure you have the correct tapes for your DDS-4 drive? 70Gb should fit on 4
tapes uncompressed or 2 compressed 2:1. A mediocre 1.2:1 would manage 3
tapes. 5 tapes sounds more like you are running DDS3 media, with a
compression of around 1.4:1.
Mal Osborne
MCSE MVP Mensa
"John Dougrez-Lewis" <jlewis@lightblue.com> wrote in message
news:40CBFB44.649AA5CE@lightblue.com...
- Posted by John Dougrez-Lewis on June 14th, 2004
Mal Osborne wrote:
No: 5 changes = 3 tapes: Write #1, Write#2, Write#3, Verify#1, Verify#2,
Verify#3.
The data on the PC is generally compressed already, so there's not much
more compression available.
Also, hardly any space of the 3rd tape is used.
Further info:
The seller of the Ultrium also stated that HP had told him that there
were known problems with using Ultrium 230's with Ultra160 SCSI cards,
and he then attempted to use a terminator that brought down the SCSI
speed to 20MB/s, which I didn't accept.
Running against the U160, the card reported the Ultrium 230's speed as
80MB/s, so I reduced it to 80MB/s and still got the write errors.
- Posted by Jerold Schulman on June 14th, 2004
I am achieving the rated performance of my Ultrium 1, on a Ultra 160 card.
On Sun, 13 Jun 2004 07:59:16 +0100, John Dougrez-Lewis <jlewis@lightblue.com>
wrote:
Jerold Schulman
Windows: General MVP
JSI, Inc.
http://www.jsiinc.com
- Posted by John Dougrez-Lewis on June 14th, 2004
Jerold Schulman wrote:
That's good news.
What backup software are you using?
Did you have make any special configuration settings?
Is your Disk drive on the same SCSI card or a different one?
regards,
John
- Posted by John Dougrez-Lewis on June 14th, 2004
Jerold Schulman wrote:
That's good news.
What backup software are you using?
Did you have make any special configuration settings?
Is your Disk drive on the same SCSI card or a different one?
regards,
John
- Posted by Jerold Schulman on June 14th, 2004
On Mon, 14 Jun 2004 13:19:13 +0100, John Dougrez-Lewis <jlewis@lightblue.com>
wrote:
Standalone U160.
TapeWare from Yosemite.
Jerold Schulman
Windows: General MVP
JSI, Inc.
http://www.jsiinc.com
- Posted by John Dougrez-Lewis on June 14th, 2004
Jerold Schulman wrote:
Thanks for the info.
John
