Hi David,

You could use some of this procedures to verify if your tape drive supports compression.

1. In Backup Exec, from the devices tab, right-click on the tape drive and select properties.
2. Select the Configuration tab, and see if "Enable compression" is checked.
3. In your backup job properties, under the General settings, verify that Hardware compression is used.
4. Use the SGMON utility to verify that the backup job is enabling hardware compression. (http://support.veritas.com/docs/287385)

Thanks for your reply.  Yes, the Backup Exec config tab does have enable compression.  I'll try the SGMON utility.

David 

Hi,

The compression setting which xTalk referrs to is known as Hardware Compression where as the BE11d setting is known as Software Compression.  All Dell's tape drives have hardware compression enabled by default (where supported by the hardware) - VS80 drives do support hardware compression. Normally, when hardware compression is available the software compression is ignored as it typically will not compress as much as hardware does. Also, you won't get double the compression with both hardware & software turned on :)

The best thing to do is first upgrade the VS80 firware as you are quiet a few revisions out of date, latest is 5538. Then turn off software compression via BE11d & try run a 55GB backup - if it completes successfully then the hardware compression is working & xTalk is not giving a true reflection of the setting. Otherwise the compression chip could be faulty, in which case Dell will replace it if the unit is still in warranty.