ABNORMAL DAT160 TAPE WEAR

[Bertrand Letemplier_1]

Hi.
I encounter very quick tape wear on an internal SCSI DAT 160 tape drive.

On 20 brand new tapes used since a few monthes, 4 have already been put away as giving backup errors.

This unit is installed in an HP ML350 G5 running W2K3R2, backup is done by NTBackup with some scripting to handle properly tape labelling through RSM.

The tape drive has already been changed once as it was almost DOA ("burning" the tapes after ONLY ONE backup).

- There is no streaming problem, when backups run normally, it takes about 45 minutes to save around 20 GB, and about the same time to verify.
- Firmware is the last version (WP86).
- Cleaning tape is inserted once a week, and each time asked by the system (RSM) or drive light.

Any ideas ?

[Steve Begley]

Hi Bertrand,

DAT media has always had a short life - you have to remember that with a rotating head, it's going to wear out the media far quicker than an SDLT or LTO drive - every time you initialise a tape, you are going to get between 10 and 20 passes over the beginning of the tape - of course this made be made worse by the media itself - there is always a trade off between hard / long life media and high head wear versus softer coated media and less head wear.

IMHO - the best way forward is to think about replacing the DAT with an SDLT or LTO drive and media.

Hope this helps - regards,

Steve.B.

[Bertrand Letemplier_1]

Thanks Steve.

I don't like DAT myself, but customer had no budget for LTO or SDLT, or will be hard to convice.

Maybe I'll remove the RSM part of the script to minimize tape access at the beginning.

And as they recently payed a lot of Euros for an audit which told them what I was saying for years (and for free), that is "invest in security", they may be more receptive to upgrading to a LTO-3 drive...

Regards

[Frank Van Riet]

Hi Bertrand,

There exists a low cost alternative that may help them : and RDX drive.
Have a look at info here :
www.hp.com/go/rdx

They can do their daily backups on that system, and use the DAT drive more for archival purposes. It will extend the life of both the drive and the tapes...

Regards,

Frank

[Pontier]

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Cordialement.