SureStore Dat24e & Windows XP - Not doing H/W compression

[CA794107]

I have an HP Pavilion, on Windows XP Pro with SP2 (and all other critical patches) with a HP Surestore DAT 24 External hooked up via a Adaptec AHA-2940U card. I'm using Sonic BackupMyPC rev 6 for backups.

The applications recognizes the drive as being capable of hardware compression, and I've used HP StorageWorks to make sure it is on the latest firmware (L111) and ran the 2:1 and 3:1 compression tests (with success) in it. But the drive is not doing any kind of hardware compression at all.

Is there anything in particular I need to do to enable the hardware compression?

Thanks!

[Lewis Finch]

First make sure you have software compression turned OFF in the software.

[CA794107]

Yup. I noticed the error message when I had software compression enabled in the Sonic backup software. So, I shut it off. But no help. I get just a smidge over 12 Gb per DDS3 tape, and it should be able to do upto 24 Gb with hardware compression

[Lewis Finch]

Not necessarily. If the data you are backing up is already compressed, it can't compress anymore and some files don't compress as well as others. If the drive is "shoe-shining" instead of streaming, you will lose space on the tape. Here is a link with more information on DAta compression.

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=lpg50244