Ultrium 460 3mb-sec

[BR761607]

I have an identical problem as reported in Hal Armstrong post dated march 27 2003.

Can anyone please point me to the source of the driver adaptec 6.4.4000.105. I have searched the web and oem site to no avail.

Lewis Finch of HP supplied this anyone know his contact details?

Many Thanks

Dave Rich

[jon sellers_2]

Hi Dave,

Have you tried the latest version from the adaptec website? The latest version should solve the problem you are seeing as it contains the following fix:
"With non-disk device such as HP Ultrium Tape drive, the driver did not negotiate transfer rate, all subsequent I/O transfers occurred as asynchronous speeds".
If you still have problems please reply to this post and I will send you a version of the driver that I know to be good.

Thanks,
Jon.

[BR761607]

Jon,

Thanks for the reply, I am currently using driver version 6.0.4000.200 which I downloaded from adaptec web site. It has improved the speed but I am still only getting 19.5 Mb/sec.

I was hoping to achieve at least 27Mb/sec as it backing up locally from raid 5.

I have tried several drivers including the latest but to date the above has worked the best.

regards

dave

[meloni]

Hi Dave,
If you can reach that value, the problem is probably not Driver related.
Poor preformances or non expected performances may be caused by a lot of factors, I we exclude a hardware problem on te Tape unit and Tape cartridge, the server it self is the principal envolved with connection problems.
In the server,the disk is the first cause, a raid 5 may have different performances depending of the number of disk and depending of the kingd of controller, the cache is another factor, depending of capacity and policy, you could have very diffenrents results.
The data present on the disk are another factor, depending of the lenght of each files and depending of the disk fragmentation.
Another fatctor is the CPU utilization, if other task are running, the performances could decrease (especialy with antivirus)
also the kind of bus architecture of the pci subsystem may be the cause of poor performances, saturing the bus or using a bridged bus to install raid controller could be the cause.
last idea is if you are backing up from Lan or San, check also that path.

http://h20015.www2.hp.com/en/document.jhtml?lc=en&docName=lpg50460
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=lpg50049

[Dragan Krnic_3]

For comparison: I'm using LTO-2 attached to
a Tekram DC-390U2W externally. The system
disk (an 18 GB IBM IC35L018UWD210-0) hangs
on the internal connector of the same card
(same bus). The system is a single P4/2GHz
with 768 MB RAM and SuSE 8.2.

Three 120 GB Maxtor 6Y120L0 IDE disks are in
a VG with a 360 GB striped lvol formatted as
reiserfs 3.6 are used for staging backups from
a samba server (200 GB, via GigaBit LAN) and a
dozen PCs (aggregate of 450 GB, via FastLAN).
With tar piped to /dev/null through a dd I get
about 115 MB/s, but writing to LTO-2 rarely
exceeds 37 MB/s, probably due to relatively low
compressibility of data (lots of zipped files).

However it is possible that PCI bus (32 bit/
33 MHz) is the brake so the drive adjusts to
the best speed at which it can continuously
stream.

[BR761607]

Thanks Dragon and Marino for your input, I will follow up your comments.

Since my original posting I have ordered a Tekram DC-390U3W card to do some back to back testing. Hopefully I can home in on the bottleneck and resolve.

Dave

[jon sellers_2]

I agree with the other respondents. If you had the known issue with the adaptec driver, where the driver negotiates at asynchronous/narrow speed, you would only get 3MB/s, which is far worse than the performance you are seeing. The bottleneck is probably elsewhere in the system so I would encourage you to use the performance trouble shooting tools to find it, as described in the link above.