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Compression enabled but not working BE 12.5 + DAT72 170M 36/72GB tapes

Whitmore29
Level 3
Hi all,

This is my first post on this forum ... yay!, However it is pain and hardship that has brought me here. Our BE is setup to "Hardware Compression else none" for full and diff jobs, xtalk utility reports that compression on the drive (Dell PV-100T-Dat72) is enabled the drive does however recignize the DAT72 tapes correctly (heard this was an issue perhaps in previous versions?). However jobs still finish at a compression ratio of 1:1 with not a singly byte in the byte count different between before and after. When i run NTbackup however just for comparisons sake compression does work. Not sure at the exact ratios i just chose files that were larger than 36GB and ran it to verify that it wasn't a hardware issue. so that leads me back to BE as the issue... however i am a fairly new user with the system so it is entirely possible that there is a mistake in my configuration somewhere. thats where you come in... any ideas what i can look at to find my underlying issues?

Thanks so much in advance this has been driving me nuts now for about 2 weeks! 

Oh BTW I have tried every driver under the sun for this tape drive and all yield the same results as well i am using the most up to date firmware that dell has to offer for my drive...


Thanks again!

Chris

24 REPLIES 24

Whitmore29
Level 3
certainly give me a few mins...

Whitmore29
Level 3
Just ran both the suggested tests, with HW compression on tracer shows that the command is sent just as before. When i re-run the job with soft compression it compresses. any other ideas where to go from here. ..

Ben_L_
Level 6
Employee
you aren't going to like my suggestion :)

Get back on the phone with Dell and show them the new tracer log and how the software compression works.  This way they can't argue that it's a problem with the data.

The drive they sent you is most likely a refurb drive, not a new one.  I have seen cases were they had to replace the drive 4 and 5 times before getting one that would compress the data.

Whitmore29
Level 3
I really hope this ins't the case my ticket is still open and the rep has been good so far... hopefully he is open to what im about to drop on him...

thanks again ... would you mind leaving this thread open this time so i can keep it updated with status updates from dell could prove benificial refernce for the future...


edit:

Hang on here does the fact that it compresses with software compression prove the drive is Okay ? and not the opposite...

Ben_L_
Level 6
Employee
Hang on here does the fact that it compresses with software compression prove the drive is Okay ? and not the opposite...

Software compression is just that, the software compress's the data then sends the compressed data to the drive.  So that tells us that the data can be compressed and that the drive can write data to the tape.  It does not tell us if the drive can compress the data though, and that is the problem we are trying to isolate.

A lot of times if you open a support ticket with us, our support reps will do con calls with hardware vendors to help take care of the issue so that there isn't any finger pointing.  So that is also an option if you need it.