Topic: Seagate Travan Problems

[Richard Bruce]

Hi,
When I try to do a backup to a Travan drive (I have both a 4/8 and a 10/20 with the same problems, both SCSI) I get a "broken pipe" message for the first backup, thereafter as long as I leave the tape inserted it will quite happily perfom backups for ever. If I then change the tape, the first backup fails with "broken pipe" again, but is OK thereafter. It's inconvenient to say the least! Has anyone else experienced this with Seagate Travan drives? Did you manage to cure it? This is slowly driving me nuts!

Richard Bruce

[Dan G.]

I have never gotten my Seagate SCSI or IDE Travan drives to work consistently and reliably.   I have seen all the same errors you have, and I have never seen it work for more than 4 days without problems.  

I know they are finicky about being cleaned, so make sure you do it at about half the recommended interval.  I'll never buy another --- that's the one thing certain about these drives...

Dan

[Darrell May]

Surprising!

I have been using and recommending Seagate IDE drives ever since e-smith offered a tape backup solution.  Goes back almost a year now.  All my clients use this drive.  I have not had one support call or a single failed drive to date.

In my office I have two servers.  Both use the Seagate drive.  Never a problem and my test server gets put throught the paces daily doing backup and restore operations for one reason or another.

Just to be clear, I am recommending the:

Seagate STT220000A Hornet 20GB IDE Tape Drive

I have not tested or used any other Seagate models to date.

Regards,

Darrell

[Dan G.]

I am referring to the SCSI version with respect to e-smith.  My experience with the IDE version is in Windows, and in the only two cases in which I actually needed the backups, the tapes were unreadable.  Some BS message about finding "an unformatted region on the tape."

[Richard Bruce]

Darrell,

I find this surprising, as this is the drive I'm having the problems with (SCSI model). On first backup on a tape, or after a system restart I get the following:
 
DUMP: Volume 1 started at: Wed Dec  5 01:38:50 2001
  DUMP: dumping (Pass III) [directories]
  DUMP: dumping (Pass IV) [regular files]
buffer (writer): write of data failed: Input/output error
bytes to write=10240, bytes written=-1, total written         10K
  DUMP: Broken pipe
  DUMP: The ENTIRE dump is aborted.

The message is always the same! I've also got a 4/8Gb drive, running in a different server (original is Dell, additional is Compaq) with exactly the same problem. Both of these drives behave identically, and are the second device in the SCSI chain, with the "terminate" jumper disconnected. Do you utilise your "always erase" settings, mentioned in your howtos, when you're backing up? I don't think this would make a difference, as a level 0 backup should always erase the tape anyway. Any thoughts gratefully accepted.

Richard

[Paul van Dun]

I'm using the HP Colorado 4/8 Gb IDE tape drive to backup my server, the previous stated error with the broken pipe message I've received it a few times with a bad tape after replacing the tape it runs perfectly.
The only time it didn't work when the data on my server reached the capacity of the tape.
So in my opion the Travan tape drive should work without out a problem, i've set it up as a slave device on my secondairy controller.


Best regards,


Paul van Dun