Hardware compression problems using LTO3 tapes

[r23]

I'm running Backup Exec 11d with latest patches and latest Symantec device drivers.

I've recently installed an HP Surestore LTO 3 drive to replace a faulty Quantum LTO3 drive.

With the Quantum drive I could quite easily fit 550Gb data onto a LTO3 tape using hardware compression but now with the HP drive it prompts for a new tape after less than 300Gb using the same compression type.

I've run comparisons using hardware compression and backing up the same data to both LTO2 AND LTO3 tapes.

LTO2 achieves a compression ratio of 1.5:1 whereas LTO3 is the equivalent of 0.67:1 using almost 20Gb tape capacity for 13.5Gb of data.

Has anyone experienced similar problems?

[Ken_Putnam]

See to recall something similar when v11d first came out

IIRC, the "solution" was to initialize the tapes using the manufacturer utility before inventorying in BackupExec