On 21/06/2011 19:33, ganiuszka wrote:
> You can use vxaTool to diagnostic purpose for your tape drive. There
> is option (from vxaTool readme file):
>
> -t [W/R/F] (optional)
>     Test write/read functionality of the device.
>
>     Optional [R]ead-only, [W]rite-only and [F]ull-tape flags
>     *** WARNING *** Any data on tape will be overwritten!
>     Use a SCRATCH tape when testing the tape drive.
>
> which may be useful in your case (especially -t F params).
>
> In my opinion the vxaTool can respond for query about extremly low
> capacity for your tapes.
>
> If all your test by using vxaTool finished well, then you can use
> other programs to writing on tapes (for example: tar) and you can
> check if other programs causes low capacity behaviour also.
>
> Here is link for vxaTool (there click "Downloads" link from left):
>
> http://tandbergdata.com/us/index.cfm/products/tape-drives/vxa-drives/vxa-2/

I had vxaTool look at my tape already. This is what I used to format my 
tape to VXA-2 format. And I did a full write test with btape earlier 
today. Here's what have been returned (following a bunch of '+'):

Write failed at block 1110671. stat=-1 ERR=No space left on device
btape: btape.c:410 Volume bytes=71.65 GB. Write rate = 5.587 MB/s
btape: btape.c:608 Wrote 1 EOF to "VXA-2" (/dev/nst0)

So, since btape comes from Bacula, I assume that, in some way, Bacula 
should be able to write to my VXA-2 tape a more or less 80GB of data. So 
what's the difference between bacula-sd's way of accessing the tape and 
btape's way?

I'll try to force the maximum size of the tape in the config but I would 
have to put it over 80GB limit if I only want the hardware compression 
to be useful. Not sure of the results, though.

Christian...

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