I have a HP 960 Ultrium 3 tape drive. Since I got it, (second hand, £90) I've been experiencing shoe-shining. Writing with tar in Linux, I average about 3Mb/s write speed. I've tried replacing both the SCSI card and the cable now, both of which made no difference at all. A curiuos observation I have made is that the write rate is not consistent. Sometimes it will write for over a minute without shoeshining, but more often, just a few seconds. I've also tried several tapes, different source drives, and even writing from Windows Backup, to no avail.
I have a problem with a LTO 3 Tape Drive. I'm using Brightstor ArcServe Backup software with Windows Server 2003.
Sometimes, the scheduled backups will stop working and going into "devices" inside this software reveals that the Tape Drive is offline. The only way to make it work again is uninstalling the Tape Drive's driver and rebooting the server: Windows then auto recognizes and installs the required drivers and the Tape Drive works again.
Has anyone ever encountered a similar problem?
I have about 50-75 LTO3 tapes stacked in my server room. Does anyone have any creative solutions on how to properly store them so they're easily accessed?
All the LTO3 cabinets I see are thousands of dollars, which seems overpriced to me.
Apologies, I'll simplify my question: Are there any degaussers or HDD shredders out there in the $500-1500 range designed for use as such that you would recommend for low-volume use?
Apparently LTO-4 drives can both read and write LTO-3 tapes. Are these tapes fully compatible with LTO-3 drives? I'm interested in real life experience more than theoretical vendor-touted compatibility :)