Average backup speeds?

[Thomas_LeTourne]

What are good averages for LTO3 drives? I just got an Exabyte Magnum 448 with one SCSI LTO3 drive and am a little confused as to what is normal for this drive.

My backup server is a Intel P4 2.63 dual core with 1GB DDR2 RAM and a 80GB SATA II local drive, it has an integrated GB NIC that connect it the LAN and a dual port Intel TOE NIC (in adaptive load balancing mode) that connects it to the iSCSI SAN. I also have two external firewire hard drives (one 500GB used as a target for weekly fulls and one 300GB used as a target for daily differentials).

The backups to tape, which are all duplicates of fulls to the firewire drives, average around 1800MB/Min. The original backups to the firewire drives average 550MB/Min over a Gb LAN connection. The backup of the local hard drive to the firewire drive runs at ~150MB/Min which seems very slow to me..

Do these numbers seem right? I'm not sure what to expect from the library for speed (and I've always thought the firewire numbers are low).

Any opinions?

Tom

[Sandy_Sandifer]

Hi Thomas,

Unfortunately this is not an easy question to answer. Speeds can vary on any number of issues and the combinations of all those issues put together.

In your case, however, I can tell you the following: 1800MB/min is more than exceptional for a backup to tape. 550MB/min to firewire drives seems very good considering they are firewire drives and are probably IDE internally. 150MB/min seems slow simply due to the logic that your network backups are faster than the local backups to the same type drives. This could be because the local drive is very slow like a 5400 RPM drive, or that it's being taxed heavily. Maybe it's the only server on the network that does backups, Active Directory, Exchange, SQL, etc...??? I'm not sure what's on that server, so all I can do is speculate, but to answer your question, yes, logic, would dictate that 150MB/min is slow for that local backup. Normally you would expect it to be faster than the network backups.

Please let us know if this answers your question, and let us know of any other problems you might be encountering relating to this issue.

Thanks.

Backup Exec for Windows Servers Free E-mail Support
http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/email_forms/intro_emailsup.asp

[Ken_Putnam]

Another thing to check is the fragmentation of the target drive. v11d is much better at this than v10 was, but you need to check the "preallocate"option


See http://support.veritas.com/docs/285733

[Jonas_Axman]

Our backups directly to tape (lto 3) run at a speed of 2800 MB/s or so, some of the servers are 100 MBit, most are GBit.

Firewire can transfer data at a speed of 30-35 MB/s or so. And 30*60 seconds = 1800 MB/s. So I guess that 1800 MB/s i OK then writing to/from firewire.

But 550 MB/s and 150 MB/s really seems to slow. Maybe eSATA would be a better option then firewire?