Well, I did see something like this at a client and I always found the best 
solution to something like this is to just format the dang thing :-)

But Seriously now...

What RAID level, 5?

RAID5 is great for writes but not for reads, and with as many reads as you need 
done for this backup you would definitely hit timeouts.  This is exactly the 
problem one of my current clients is facing.

What about the last time SCANDISK was run?  We found a heavily fragmented disk 
caused these types of timeouts as well.

Some of the other things we tried was to break up the server backup at the file 
list.  This was a bit more labor intensive, but it did work to some degree.

HTH

David

Quoting Bruno.Bossier AT comparex DOT be:

> We have a server with a directory which contains over 3 million files for a
> total amount of nearly 150 Gb. We are trying to back this up in a
> reasonable amount of time (12 to 14 hours maximum). OTM is enabled. We have
> not succeeded so far. A lot of time is lost at the beginning of the backup
> when the backup is going through the directory structure to check all
> files. This takes several hours. The first we already did until now is to
> set the maximum cache size to 0 (unlimited). This stopped the errors we saw
> in the Windows eventlog when OTM is started and then aborted after 40
> minutes, then restarted again ....
> 
> Can someone give some suggestions to speed up this backup ?
> 
> Thanks,
> Bruno
> 
> 
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