What’s The Hold-up?
What if you install a DLTtape drive and you
don’t get the performance you expect? Here are a few things to
check. First, make sure your DLTtape drive is properly defined for
the host system. It is common for a SCSI host to disable (Unbuffered
Mode) the adaptive cache on the drive if it doesn’t recognize the
product identification string returned by an inquiry command.
This cache enables the drive to adapt to the data rate of your host
system and keep your drive streaming at peak performance. See
your DLTtape drive documentation for more details on this.
Second, be sure your disk is de-fragmented on a regular basis.
Fragmented disks and files take much longer to back up. Third,
check your host’s record size. DLT 8000 drives, for instance, sup-
port record sizes up to 64MB each. In general, the larger the record
size, the better the throughput. Many software applications will
default to 512-byte records, often resulting in poor performance.
Check with your ISV (independent software vendor) to see if their
software supports greater record sizes. Finally, check to make sure
you’re using the correct DLTtape media for highest performance.
In the SDLT 220 drive, for example, only Super DLTtape I media is
capable of recording data at the drive’s 110GB native capacity. If
you attempt this with a DLTtape IV cartridge, the system will auto-
matically default to the tape’s maximum capacity of 40GB native
and 80GB compressed.
To Compress Or Not To Compress?
Successful compression can
increases your DLTtape system’s data transfer rate. All DLTtape sys-
tems use the LZ1 (Lempel-Ziv) compression algorithm, which was
selected over other algorithms for its superior versatility and effi-
ciency. Although Quantum and most other tape drive manufactur-
ers use a 2:1 compression ratio as an average, actual compression
can be highly variable depending on your input data. Compression
algorithms “look” for repeatable data patterns that can be compact-
USING THE DLTtape SYSTEM
16.6
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