Ultrium 960

[Charalambos Papadopoulo]

Is there any risk in attaching an external Ultrium 960 to an Ultra2 LVD 32 bit SCSI card?

I know performance won't be great but I'm hoping it'll be better than the VS80 DLT we're currently using.

[Rob Leadbeater · Accepted solution]

Hi,

There is no risk. The Ultrium 960 will work fine, and will probably be much faster.

I recently compared a DLT 80 with an LTO-2 drive on an old SCSI card, and the LTO drive was around 3 times faster.

Hope this helps,

Regards,

Rob

[Charalambos Papadopoulo]

Hi Rob

Thanks very much for that, I'll give it a go :)

[Wei Jung]

Having such a fast drive in s Ultra2 card, what a shame :)
IT works, but it will be limited to the SCSI controller capability.

If you are going to get a Ultrium 960, you might as well go for the controller, totally worth it.

[Charalambos Papadopoulo]

I know, it is a shame! :) I'd really like to see what it can do!

However, it's halved my backup window and has the capacity to support this place for the next three years or so.

I'm leaving soon so I'll leave instructions to upgrade the SCSI card if they need it to go faster. Right now the SCSI is limiting, but the network (100mbps) utilization is at 75% during backup anyhow, so they'd only get limited benefit before the network became the bottleneck. Plus the backup server is an old desktop :(

Ideally they need new SCSI, backup server, and network, but at least now they have a good backup :)

[Duncan Aynsley]

It is desirable for the "slowest" element of the backup solution to be the tape unit. If the tape unit can process information faster than the SCSI channel can supply data to it, it will be doing a "shoe shine". i.e. constantly having to rewind to where it wrote the last blocks of data on the tape. This activity will seriously impact the device in "wear and tear" terms, reducing its life expectancy.