Surestore 818 label/inventory slow

[Jordan Griesshaber]

We has a Surestore 418 that could inventory a DLT IV tape in 1 min 30 secs.
The Surestore 818 we have cannot inventory a tape in under 4 mins and takes 4min 55secs exactly to label a tape.
Seems ridiculously slow, the throughput seems to be okay around 200MB/min.
But to take 30 min inventory a whole caddy seems weird.
Any help would be great.

[Eugeny Brychkov]

Hello Jordan,
please download and install HP Library and Tape Tools from http://www.hp.com/cposupport/information_storage/support_doc/lpg50128.html and
- check/update firmware of autoloader;
- run tests, generate support ticket and analyze it;
- try new HP tapes;
- try doing inventory check with autoloader disconnected off the SCSI bus;
Symptoms you mentioned point to DLT drive, so please check if it's really so (looking through the autoloader's window to understand if drive operating tape for 5 minutes). I feel latest firmware can solve your issue.
Good luck!
Eugeny

[Curtis Ballard]

Unfortunately you will probably find out that there is nothing that can be done to improve that performance. I've done extensive load/unload time testing on DLT drives and the DLT8000 drive takes much longer to load/calibrate and unload than the 4000. The times you are seeing are not out of line for an 8000 drive.

[CA713937]

Curtis is right, the DLT8000 takes longer to load and calibrate tapes.

You might want to check the drive error log (in the LTT support ticket), to see if there are any cleaning requests. When the drive head gets dirty, it takes much longer to load tapes (due to calibration retries).

The latest firmware is 2.12 for the autoloader, and V59 for the drive.