Ultrium 3 tape drive shoe-shining, 3Mb/s: and it's not the cable

Posted by mowsala on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by mowsala
Published on 2012-06-22T21:28:26Z Indexed on 2012/06/23 3:18 UTC
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backup

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tar

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tape

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scsi

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lto-3

I have a HP 960 Ultrium 3 tape drive. Since I got it, (second hand, £90) I've been experiencing shoe-shining. Writing with tar in Linux, I average about 3Mb/s write speed. I've tried replacing both the SCSI card and the cable now, both of which made no difference at all. A curiuos observation I have made is that the write rate is not consistent. Sometimes it will write for over a minute without shoeshining, but more often, just a few seconds. I've also tried several tapes, different source drives, and even writing from Windows Backup, to no avail.

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