MSL5026 high density on Solaris

[Vincent Commarieu]

Hi,

I have a MSL5026 connected to a Sun Solaris 8

I have tried all sort of devices (c,h,u) but cannot backup more than 100Gb.
The same tape drive connected to the W2K boxes works fine over 100Gb

Any ideas?

Ta

[Stuart Whitby]

What kind of data are you trying to back up? Also, is the data software-compressed before it's sent to tape? If so, you'll see virtually no difference using hardware compression, and the amount backed up will be the amount of compressed data, not the uncompressed amount.

I'd suggest using tar of a 1GB (or fixed size) text file and see how many times you can fit it on. This should show whether compression is working correctly.

[Duncan Greenwood]

Do you have the latest st driver patch for Solaris ? I can't remember when SDLT support was added, but you may not have built-in support if you installation is old and unpatched.

# strings /kernel/drv/st | grep DLT

will tell you what built-in support your current driver has.

If you can't patch, you can add the necessary definition by hand to /kernel/drv/st.conf.

Try sunsolve.sun.com for both. Google should also help with recommended settings for st.conf.

hth

D
#

[Vincent Commarieu]

Thanks.

Looks like the problem might be with the values in st.conf.
At the moment, it is set with the values that came when installing the device drivers from Compaq rev 3.26.
I have not found anything on the Compaq web site, but via google and sunsolve, have got different settings for Quantum SDLT. Most likely the MSL5026 is a Quantum, so I will give it a go.
As it takes several hours to find out, I will keep you posted later on when I got it going.
Thanks for your help