Travan SCSI tape random failures

[Trevor Blackwell]

I'm running 4.7-RELEASE on a dual P4-Xeon machine and trying to back up
to a Seagate 10/20 GB Travan tape drive:

sa0 at ahd1 bus 0 target 4 lun 0
sa0: Seagate STT2N 6A51 Removable Sequential Access SCSI-2 device 
sa0: 10.000MB/s transfers (10.000MHz, offset 15)

It's in the default mode:

tlb tlb$ sudo mt -f /dev/sa0.ctl status
Mode  Density  Blocksize  bpi  Compression
Current:  0x47 variable   0disabled
...

When I write to it, it usually fails after a few hundred MB, but the
amount of data is not repeatable even when I write identical files. For
example:

tlb tlb$ sudo dd of=/dev/nsa0 if=[huge file] bs=10240
dd: /dev/nsa0: short write on tape device
18139+0 records in
18138+1 records out

The kernel reports:

/kernel: (sa0:ahd1:0:4:0): WRITE FILEMARKS. CDB: 10 0 0 0 1 0 
/kernel: (sa0:ahd1:0:4:0): MEDIUM ERROR info:1 asc:c,0
/kernel: (sa0:ahd1:0:4:0): Write error
/kernel: (sa0:ahd1:0:4:0): failed to write terminating filemark(s)
/kernel: (sa0:ahd1:0:4:0): tape is now frozen- use an OFFLINE, REWIND or
MTEOM command to clear this state.

The drive and tape are both new; I haven't used this kind before. Any
suggestions?

-- 
Trevor Blackwell  [EMAIL PROTECTED]   (650) 210-9272


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Re: Travan SCSI tape random failures

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, Oct 30, 2003, Trevor Blackwell wrote:

I'm running 4.7-RELEASE on a dual P4-Xeon machine and trying to back up
to a Seagate 10/20 GB Travan tape drive:

...
When I write to it, it usually fails after a few hundred MB, but the
amount of data is not repeatable even when I write identical files. For
example:

The Travan tape drives are slightly more reliable than the old Colorado
Memory Systems Junko floppy tape drives, but not much.

We used Travan drives for about a year on several systems, but found that
they often had problmes with apparent tape failures, possible drive
misalignment, etc.

We're now doing a lot of our backups using external FireWire 120gb hard
drives.  They're less expensive than reliable high capacity SCSI DLT drives
and the associated media (DLT tapes to back up 120gb cost about the same as
the external FireWire drives).

Bill
--
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URL: http://www.celestial.com/

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