Ultrium 1840 Performance problem

[Slawomir Chalupa]

Greetings all, at first, sorry for my english.
We have recently bought a LTO-4 Ultrium 1840 tape drive and it works on a LSI Logic U320 SCSI controller. We have six 120GB scsi hdds in RAID-5 on a different PCI-X scsi controller. We've done some tests and we found a big difference in performance that depends on the number of files to backup. In our company we need a file-by-file process and there are around 1million files to backup (around 80GB altogether). Could somebody advise how could we increase the speed of that process because now it takes over 7 hours! We found the drive working quite fast if there is a one big file. During our first test we had 150MB folder (27000 files) and it took 3.5 mins to backup it. The second test was with 2.5GB folder (1 file) and it took 50 secs!!!!! to backup it. So it seems there would be better if it was a drive image than file-by-file method. But as I said, we needed file-by-file for our backup. Thank you in advance

[meloni]

You already answered the question,
you need to image the logical disk to speed up the backup.
The problem is not with the tape drive, but with the source of the data.