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Surestore Ultrium 230 E - Compression problem

 
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David Gill_3
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Surestore Ultrium 230 E - Compression problem

I have two Ultrium 230 external drives on two seperate servers. One of the drives works fine and the other is giving problems when backing up. It was backing up fine even though a little slow it managed to put around 100 Gigs of stuff onto the tape in a couple of hours. Then out of the blue it would request a new tape at around 60 gigs...if you put a second tape in then it will finish the backup. Any ideas why it won't put all the data on one tape now. I am using backup exec to do the backups. I have updated the firmware to the latest version and run several of the tests in tapetools and it passes them all. To see if it was maybe a SCSI problem I swapped the two backup drives between the two different servers. The drive which is giving the problem also gave the same problem on the second server which rules out any communication problem and the drive that was working is now running fine on the first server which was giving the problems with the first tape drive. I am currently running the LTO acceptance test again and will attach the results of this in another message when it is done. Any help would be great as this is drivng me nuts.

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Dave Dewar
Trusted Contributor

Re: Surestore Ultrium 230 E - Compression problem

Hi David,

Since your issue follows the tape drive it sounds like you are experiencing capacity loss due to a drive issue. It could possibly be due to faulty media as well but you can easily test this by using another peice of media in the problem drive.

Use LTT to generate a support ticket for your problem drive, leave the tape being used loaded when you do this. Zip up the support ticket and attach it to a messgae here and ill have a look and see if I can identify your issue.

Cheers,

Dave Dewar
David Gill_3
New Member

Re: Surestore Ultrium 230 E - Compression problem

It failed the LTO acceptance test..no specific error I could see....I did the test twice with two different pieces of media. Attached is the support ticket. Is there anything else that might be useful?

Thanks,

Dave
Dave Dewar
Trusted Contributor
Solution

Re: Surestore Ultrium 230 E - Compression problem

Hi David,

Your drive IE70M02552 is giving very poor write and read performance and hence is having to do multiple rewrites to ensure the data written is recoverable. This is resulting in significant capacity loss, the logs show about 60% capacity acheived which agrees with your observations.
One of you tapes, 1090021426 shows poor performance on both your units, (other drive IE71E00924) so there is some tape factor here as well.
According to the logs your drive was manufactured in 2000 so is now out of warranty, however you might want to check with the seller as warranty is from time of sale. Your drive has had quite a bit of use over last 4 years and I suspect you are suffering head issues.
In terms of what you can do, you might want to try running a cleaning tape and using brand new media to see if that recovers things somewhat, otherwise phone up HP support, confirm warranty situation and see if an out of warranty repair is possible.

Sorry I can't be of more help

Cheers,

Dave Dewar
David Gill_3
New Member

Re: Surestore Ultrium 230 E - Compression problem

Thanks Dave....that clears things up a bit. Will ring HP support and find out what my options are. I know the last time I wanted a drive fixed they wouldn't do it so I had to use a 3rd party company. The drive is question is working fine to this day so that might be the option.

Thanks again..

Dave