Strange HBA card and tape drive problems

[Asuka17377]

System：windows10 pro
Motherboard：MSI b550m mortar wifi
CPU：Ryzen 7 5800x
GPU：SAPPHIRE RX580 8G
HBA card：Dell H200E
Tape Drives：HP LTO6-ultrium 6250
I use this to store some cold data, with LTFS file system and fastcopy... recently had a problem with the tape drive not being very fast, before it was about 100MB/s+. But recently it's only less than 30MB/s...
I have tried to clean the PCIE interface and plug, and I have also cleaned the SFF-8088 cable plug and interface, but it is still the same. What is the problem?

 

[DavidWJohnston]

Not sure, but maybe some things to consider:

Is it only the write speed that's slow, or the read as well?

Try a different tape, or a head cleaning tape

Try testing the speed of the data source or target

Is one of your CPU cores being maxed out, or is a foreign process using CPU? Maybe AV or something is reading the data in the pipe.

Is the type of data changing, or something else is different? The compressibility of the source data may affect the apparent speed.

 

[Asuka17377]

Not sure, but maybe some things to consider:

Is it only the write speed that's slow, or the read as well?

Try a different tape, or a head cleaning tape

Try testing the speed of the data source or target

Is one of your CPU cores being maxed out, or is a foreign process using CPU? Maybe AV or something is reading the data in the pipe.

Is the type of data changing, or something else is different? The compressibility of the source data may affect the apparent speed.

Thanks，I've only tried writing data before, I'm building my new rack this weekend，use aluminum profiles, got my hands full (almost 300 bolts), probably Monday or Tuesday I'll try again and provide another data.

 

[Moopere]

I haven't used LTFS before but presumably it manages itself much as other backup software.

The main killer for tape drive speed is being connected to a system that can't maintain consistently high data flow. All these modern HP drives will adjust their write speed to try and match source data flow, but if your system is struggling, even for a moment, to maintain continuous data flow at about 70-80MB/s (minimum!) then you'll get shoe-shining and the average data rate plummets.

On my backup systems the mostly likely culprit is a badly fragmented source drive or trying to backup lots of tiny files.

Next time you try this have a look at your source drive - taskmgr should be sufficient - if your source drive activity is maxed out then this will be the problem ... the source can't supply the tape with sufficient data flow.

Also have a listen to the drive - if its shoe-shining this is the issue - again, almost certainly its not receiving enough data flow to keep it running.

 

[Asuka17377]

I haven't used LTFS before but presumably it manages itself much as other backup software.

The main killer for tape drive speed is being connected to a system that can't maintain consistently high data flow. All these modern HP drives will adjust their write speed to try and match source data flow, but if your system is struggling, even for a moment, to maintain continuous data flow at about 70-80MB/s (minimum!) then you'll get shoe-shining and the average data rate plummets.

On my backup systems the mostly likely culprit is a badly fragmented source drive or trying to backup lots of tiny files.

Next time you try this have a look at your source drive - taskmgr should be sufficient - if your source drive activity is maxed out then this will be the problem ... the source can't supply the tape with sufficient data flow.

Also have a listen to the drive - if its shoe-shining this is the issue - again, almost certainly its not receiving enough data flow to keep it running.

I think I've found the problem...it's Windows Defender virus scan，This problem was solved immediately after I closed it

 

[TRACKER]

I always stop defender when transferring data to/from tape with LTFS

 

[Asuka17377]

I always stop defender when transferring data to/from tape with LTFS

What software do you use? I feel that fastcopy is not suitable for use on tapes of the LTFS file system.

 

[TRACKER]

Until recently i used just copy/paste but...this approach does not count with location of the files on the tape and there is lot of shoe shining during copy. Since then i use command line version of ltfscopy:
cmd> ltfscopy.exe -c -r -s "source_dir" -d "target_dir"

 

[Asuka17377]

Until recently i used just copy/paste but...this approach does not count with location of the files on the tape and there is lot of shoe shining during copy. Since then i use command line version of ltfscopy:
cmd> ltfscopy.exe -c -r -s "source_dir" -d "target_dir"

My friend, he seems to have developed a [FastcopyGUI] for HP/HPE tape drives, on GitHub, the user name is [zhaoyangwx], if you are interested, you can check it out
And i'm sorry,I have not used,I can't read the source code, he didn't write the manual, currently my tapes are all in use and there is no blank tape to test it, so it's just lying around inside my computer.

 

[TRACKER]

good to know, will have a look.