Ultrium 215 LTO1 - Bad Bandwith Performance

[Mario Schäfer]

Hi All,
I'm using an older HP Ultrium 215 Internal Tape Drive with an Adaptec 29160N Ultra160 SCSI-Controller. The drives has done backups from my server the last two years without any problems. Bandwith was for read/write operations was about 16 MB/sec, the maximum possible for the drive and controller. Now I've decided to move it to my workstation for serveral reasons and expected a very bad bandwith with 1,9 MB/sec.

I've done the following actions without any change of the problem:
-Firmware Update of LTO Drive to latest version
-Firmware Update of SCSI-Controller to latest version
-Exchange of the SCSI-cable
-Disconnet all other PCI Cards
-Change the PCI-Slot of the SCSI-Controller to any other slot
-Reinstall of Windows

After all the problems persists. I've always used the installation test with HP Tape Tools which shows the bad performance of 1,9 MB/sec at 12% of maximum bandwith. A backup of 100 GB tooks about 2 full days, no matter if I use Windows Backup or HP DataProtector.

After move back the controller and drive to my sever, the performance reached 12 MB/sec again.
So the problem seemes to be the PCI-Bus in my workstation. Has anyone further ideas to solve my performance problem?

I'll will test the hardware in another workstation in the next days. But the drive could not retain there.

I've attached the HP LTT install check log with the errors.

[Eemans Dany]

Hi,

2 questions,

1.
Your server is connected to a 100 MB lan or an 1000 Mb lan, is your pc connected on the same lan speed as your server.

2.
The PCI bus in your server can be a dedicated pci bus directly to the CPU. Is the PCI bus in your worktation also a standalone or is it shared with other components like a HD controller.
Check the documentation of your workstation to isolate a free pci bus (not shared with other components).

Dany

[Mario Schäfer]

Both systems are connected over GBit LAN, but I'll do only local backups, so this could't be a bottleneck.

The SCSI-Controller has a dedicated IRQ, this means it shares no ressources with other PCI-cards and has direct access to the CPU. Correct me if I'm wrong.

On the server I used the tape drivers from W2k03, on the workstation the ones from XP. I also tried the original HP drivers without any effects. The Adaptec driver seems to be the same, version is the same like the OS drivers. I've installed them anyway - also without any changes of the problem.