Topic: IDE - AIT tape drive very slow

[julian]

Dear All,
I've got a SONY AIT-1 drive running internally on the IDE bus on a 5.6 server and flexbackup is reporting speeds of around 600kbps which seems very slow. Does anyone know if there's some ide-parm setting or some such thing I could use to speed it up.
Sony claims a 4meg transfer rate although I could of course be mixing up my bits and bytes.
All the best,
Julian

[jon]

i'm getting 424kB/s using a seagate STT20000A ide drive.  so, about 1.5GB/hour.  i also think this is a bit slow, but remember, the backup process GZIP's all files before it writes it to tape.  my little 200Mhz pentium is normally at 95 - 100% when i'm doing my backup.  backup speed is a direct function of cpu speed.

[julian]

well I tried this

hdparm -d1 /dev/hdd

and I've got the speed up to 700kbps  

but looking at top I'm never worse off than 90% idle so the processor's not the bottleneck

but it still seems slow to me  

[KelvinLee]

I've used the Sony AIT-1 IDE drives with Shad Lord's Arkeia Backup very successfully with no speed issues. As a rule, the first thing I do if there is a tape drive in the SME server, is to install Arkeia and forget about flexbackup. Arkeia can make use of more advanced features of the AIT-1 (like the MIC) etc.

Kelvin