Sony AIT-2 tape throughput

by James Bon » Wed, 13 Mar 2002 12:12:12

How can I find out the throughput of my Sony AIT-2 SCSI tape drive?

I am trying to use Jorge Schilling's 'sdd' to read a remote tape drive and I
verified that my 100Mbps network is indeed giving me a throughput of

When I use the tape drive locally, I am able to restore the 35GB tar archive
on the tape within 2 hours.

me ~6hours to restore the same tape, everything else remaining the same.

Could the tape streaming be the issue? sdd and/or tar are unable to read
fast enough from the tape to keep it streaming? What is the throughput of
the AIT-2 tape? How can I find it out? Also, I *am* using the rmt server
that comes with Schilling's 'star' and not the standard Solaris rmt server.

Thanks

Top

1. Adaptec 2940 and Sony AIT-2 Tape Drive Problems

I have been having some issues running backup on my Linux file server
the past few weeks. The server setup is as follows:

OS: Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES release 4 (Nahant)
SCSI Card: Adaptec 2940
Tape Drive: Sony SDX-500V (Internal AIT-2)
Backup Software: Bru (version 16.0)
The tape drive is the only SCSI device in the server

What happens is, it backs up perfectly fine for a while, backup,
verify, and restoring from tape works beautifly! Then all of a sudden
it starts giving an error, it still backs up, just the backup never
seems to finish completely:

/var/log/backup.log:
...[list of files being backed up]...
bru: [I109] attention - assuming end of volume 1 (unknown size)

Apparently it's asking for another volume, but since the job is running
in the background, it just aborts.

Here is what appears in the output of dmesg:
st0: Error with sense data: Info fld=0x676, Current st0: sense key
Medium Error
Additional sense: Write error
st0: Error with sense data: Info fld=0x40, Current st0: sense key
Medium Error
Additional sense: Write error
st0: Error with sense data: Info fld=0x40, Current st0: sense key
Medium Error
Additional sense: Write error
st0: Error with sense data: Info fld=0x40, Current st0: sense key
Medium Error
Additional sense: Write error
st0: Error with sense data: Info fld=0x1, Current st0: sense key Medium
Error
Additional sense: Write error
st0: Error on write filemark.

There are no messages in /var/log/messages

The same problem happened a few months ago, back then, we took the
server apart, cleaned everything, made sure all the SCSI settings were
correct, replaced the SCSI card, then replaced the SCSI cable with a
brand new one, none of that helped the problem... a week or so later,
it just kind of went away on it's own.

Anyone have any ideas on what may be causing this and what I can do to
try and stop these seemingly random periods of failures?

Thanks,
-- Dmitriy M

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