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Legacy Forums => Experienced User Forum => Topic started by: julian on February 04, 2004, 07:33:28 PM

Title: IDE - AIT tape drive very slow
Post by: julian on February 04, 2004, 07:33:28 PM

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

Title: Re: IDE - AIT tape drive very slow
Post by: jon on February 04, 2004, 08:20:15 PM

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.

Title: IDE - AIT tape drive very slow
Post by: julian on February 04, 2004, 08:31:34 PM

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  :-?

Title: IDE - AIT tape drive very slow
Post by: KelvinLee on February 05, 2004, 01:01:11 PM

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