HP Surestore Compression (bad drive?)

[Keven Tipping_3]

Greetings to all.

I recently spent a good $300 for a HP SureStore 12000E Autoloader. It came with 6 working authentic preloaded Magazines too (5 tapes- 1 cleaning tape per mag).

The drive works wonderfully. Its pretty speedy, and has given me *zero* errors (soft or hard). It makes my life easy, as I only have around 2 gigs to backup (currently), so I just leave it on, and it backs up whenever to whatever cartridge.

There is one thing. I don't know if its the drive or software. HP Library Tools reports the comression @ 2.23:1 with the 200mb test. Thats good.

However, I noticed that when I backup my server (which contains primarily programs, for example the 600mb unzipped CD image of Veritas Backup Exec that Veritas offers for download), both my RAID array and my Main OS Raid array, the compression is pretty bad...

BackupExec 9 reports that the tapes usually have around 3.10-3.25gb of free space (even after a quick format). Thought 'em was 4gb tapes, 8gb Compressed?

Here is what worries me.. It could just be that for the first time, I've actually been able to *see* the drive comression rate on the screen, my last DDS2 Single drive didn't have that feature. Anyhow. The drive gets down to around "Write 0.8" and sticks there when backing my data. Thats 0.8:1, WITH drive compression.... Ouchio. So 3.1gb I guess is correct.

As I said, it is fairly heavy data. .Cabs and all, CD images, etc.. I only have about 1.5gb to backup currently, so I can't test out the full feature of Compression. But common. 0.8:1? What is that??

According to HP, even Compressed Man pages are over 1:1 compressed. I doubt that my data is any heavier then that..

So. Since the drive does pass the Library tests, I've cleaned it, used new cartridges, etc... Is it just my data, or is the drive busted? It was a ebay item for $300 (Canadian), so it was not a light purchase (I only got it because DLT tapes are $70 a peice, and DDS2 is $15 a tape).

Any ideas? Is the drive busted, or is it just the weight of my data bearing down on the compression?

[CA661819]

It's likely the weight of your data as you mentioned. You are going to get relatively little compression on the files that you have. Take the 4G tape, minus a little overhead and it looks like you're right on the button as far as free space goes (although 3.1G seems a little low).
I run backups on quite a few machines and see a distinct difference in compression rates among like drives, it all has to do with what I'm backing up. One drive is backing up an Oracle database and gets better than 2:1 compression. Another drive is backing up solely claim images (.tif files) and get ZERO compression.
If you had the space, and the time, you could try filling up the drive with some .txt or like files and see how the drive handles them.
I haven't used BackupExec 9 yet but is there a way in the logs to see the individual compression rates on the files? Whether you're using software or hardware can make a difference too.

Not much, but some thoughts....
Jim