PowerVault 110 soft write errors/compression issue

Question

I have a PowerVault 110 DLT SDLT1-320 external drive. It's been in service since Nov-2005 and has a 10 tape rotation (tapes are the same age) and I'm using Veritas BackupExec 10d. Everything was working fine up until last week when my jobs (full nightly backups) would fail to finish. The tape would be ejected and Veritas would have a Media Remove error (58063) and when the error is acknowledged it would then have a Media Insert error (58061). The data being backed up is no where near the capacity of the tapes.   Upon further investigation, some of the tapes have as high as 30,000 soft write errors since November, while others have as low as 2,500. The ones that have higher numbers of errors also show something else very bizarre...compression ratios of 3,225,549:1, while successful backups show a compression ratio of 1.42:1. I have Hardware Compression (software if hardware not available) selected and this has worked fine prior to last week.   I'm attempting to get some help from Veritas but they have so far only told me what I was able to read on their KB. I've cleaned the drive I've run a long erase on suspect tapes...etc.   Does anyone know if this is a hardware, media, driver or software issue? I plan on staying late tomorrow night to troubleshoot this but I'm not sure where to start trying.....nothing has changed on my server - no updates or hardware changes, etc.   Where do I start?   Many thanks,   Kevin Coles

barhampa · Answer

First thing that comes tomind is the age of yourcleaning tape. How many passes and what type of cleaning tape ?

PowerVault

Was this post helpful?