Ultrium 400GB tape does not go beyond 100GB capacity

[Rui Meleiro]

Scenario:

Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition (w/all patches)
Veritas Backup Exec 9.1 rev.4691
HP Ultrium 460
400GB Ultrium 2 tapes

Problem:

Cannot go beyond 100GB limit

On media stats, capacity for the 400GB tape is shown as 196GB with
compression ratio of 1,78:1. Used capacity is 98,3 GB, available 97,4 GB.
Media is defined as infinite, no overwrite.When a test run of a backup of
around 52GB i performed, it fails with error code 0xa0008703, stating that
the drive available capacity is only of 711MB.

It looks that Veritas BE is unable to go beyond that 100GB limit (98,3GB
+ 711MB), although the media is referred as having 196GB capacity.
Nevertheless, we are using 400GB tapes, so neither those capacities are
correct. Eventually, some (un)logical explanation is that the listed media
types do not go further than 100GB capacity. I'm not sure this is simply a driver problem, although the most current driver is installed. Anyone?

TIA

Rui Meleiro

[Cameron Todd]

I am not familar with Ultrium technology, nor BE, but assume that the 400Gb listed tape capacity is the theroetical compressed data figure, which is normally twice the raw (ie. real) data capacity. Therefore the 196Gb figure sounds valid if it means real data capacity, even if the other figures don't seem to add up.
Is hardware compression active on the tape device?
What block size settings are used by the tape device and also by the BE software?


Cameron.

[josemaria cr]

Hi,

Cameron says right, can depends on the capacity, you can try with different kind of data (txt/jpg) and see the difference, in any case is better the hardware compression.

jmc