Ultrium 215e and compression

[Martin Dettbarn]

I see a few others in this forum have issues with compression, time to add me to the list as well.

For the past 6 months or so we've been using an ultrium 215e on a netraid 3 adapter with Backup Exec 7.3.

We were typically getting about 180gb/tape without any problems. Out of the blue (and mean, out of the blue) the drive started to bung up the jobs and was squeezing only 98gb/tape. The server never went down, no drivers changed or software messed around with on the backup server, or any of the other machines it was trying to back up.

I downloaded the most recent StoreageWorks diagtools and ran the compression test. Sure enough, it said "Compression disabled on the drive", "Enable compression?" I clicked yes, ran the test and it said I was getting 2:1 compression.

When the next large job ran, I was getting again only 98gb/tape telling me compression was again off, even though the logs of the backupexec state 'Hardware Compression Enabled'. The job is set to use hardware or none, it does not try to use software.

I looked through the tape tools and was hoping there was someway I could flag the drive from the software to use hardware compression, not just for the test. It seems to turn back off when the scheduled jobs run. This is very frustrating...

I updated the firmware on the drive as well as per tapetools suggestion, no change.

The cleaning light isn't on, the device passes all self tests... as far as I can tell everything is as it always has been.

Any suggestions appreciated...

Martin

[Eugeny Brychkov]

Martin,
do not connect tape drives to RAID controllers. See http://www.hp.com/cposupport/information_storage/support_doc/lpg50063.html
Eugeny

[Martin Dettbarn]

Whoops, did I say it was connected to it? I am sorry, my head was apparently up my arse a bit there. It is not actually connected to the netraid, but backing up a netraid array =/

[Martin Dettbarn]

Ended up being a fault ultrium drive despite all diagnostic tools reporting ok. Once our replacement came we just hooked it up and compression was working fine.