We've been having a time with our backups as of late.  We back up all of our servers to the MD1000 nightly.  About 2 months ago, we started noticing that all of our backups aren't able to be restored and we are getting delayed write failures.  I've been going through my logical process of trying to fix this problem.  I updated all of the drivers for my Perc 5i and 5e controllers, BIOS firmware, NIC drivers and firmware,  BMC firmware, and the HDD firmware.  No fixes here.  I changed the page files to see if maybe that was causing any issues with a minimum page size.  I thought that maybe it was a scheduling conflict where 2 backup sets may be running at the same time but I've run backups in the middle of the day by themselves and they still will not complete.  I'm kind of running out of ideas here.  For a temporary solution, I have purchased 2 1TB NAS external hard drives and am now backing up to these instead.  These backups do complete but they are so slow. 

There are 2 servers that do successfully complete to the MD1000 every night.  These backup files are about 1/3 of the size of the ones that are failing.  The ones that fail are all failing around the 26-30GB mark.

I'm starting to wonder if it is a space issue even though i have about 500 GB left in the backup directory.  When backing up to the MD1000, I had one of HDD's volume fill up completely and I got the same delayed write errors as I get with the MD1000.

I've searched this to no end and have spent many hours on the phone with Dell storage specialists who couldn't really help me.   If anyone has any ideas please let me know.  Thanks.

Our servers are all running Server 2003 and we backup using NTbackup.

Some errors I am getting are:

"Backup file contains unrecognized data and cannot be used."

"ntbackup error:  'An inconsistency was encountered in the requested backup file.'"

"The device reported an error on a request to write data to media.  There may be a hardware or media problem."

"Delayed write failed:  Windows was unable to save all the data for the file XXXXXX.  The data has been lost.  This error may be caused by a failure of your computer hardware or network connection."