Ultrium 215

[BR710629]

I have an Ultrium 215 on a Compaq Proliant server, running W2K SP2 with Arcserve 2000 SP4. We are getting speeds of around 75 to 85 MB/min. Could I by any chance get a higer rate? Even on the local server I won't get a higer speed than the above mentioned. Help... the backup runs into our working hours.

Any help will be appreciated.

Larry

[Rothery Harris]

Dear Larry,
The 'native' transfer rate of the Ultrium 215 tape drive is 7.5MB/s. With data compression you can expect a little higher than this but it depends on the data.
Most of the performance problems with fast tape drives are due to the system not being able to deliver the data flow. This can be caused by the filesystem, size of file (eg many small files cause lower transfer rate) or disk drive configuration.
With Ultrium type drives use of RAID disk is essential. HP does have a perfomance assessment tool called 'PAT' which can assess the speed of the system and disks. PAT is available on request from HP.

Regards

Rothery

[BR679885]

I have had the same problem on my server. My problem was solved by installing the latest SCSI-drivers available.
My Adaptec-39160 ten-doubled its transferspeed!!!

[Pieter 't Hart]

we had a unit installed by a third party which had poor performance until we discovered they forgot to put a correct (lvd)terminator on the scsi-bus
check the whole path is consistent (e.g. ultra scsi-2 lvd)
scsi-controller
ultrium drive
terminator
other devices on this bus (preferrably none : a dedicated controller for the backup-unit)