It could be the drive and it could be the connection to the drive.  Swap
out the cable first - it's easiest, cheapest, and most prone to having a
bad connection.  Test.  Bacula uses standard device commands. You should
use the mt and mtx commands directly - you are more likely to get more
information.  Drives do go bad, but the mechanical stuff is usually what
becomes problematic. You will need to consult the PV124T manual for
testing the changer and/or drive outside of your OS.

Patti Clark
Linux System Administrator
R&D Systems Support Oak Ridge National Laboratory



On 5/9/14 2:52 PM, "Brian C. Huffman" <bhuffman AT etinternational DOT com> 
wrote:

>All,
>
>I am using Bacula 5.2.13 on CentOS 6.5 with a Dell PV124t using an LTO4
>drive.
>
>Lately I noticed that I was replacing tapes more and more often. When I
>went to look at the VolBytes of the tapes, they don't appear to be
>storing nearly as much data as they used to before an "End of medium" is
>being triggered.
>
>For example, I'm seeing an average of 515GB in the VolBytes field of
>"list volumes."  Shouldn't I be getting at least 800GB for LTO4?  I
>recall that I used to see in the 1 TB range for tapes (depending on
>compression).
>
>I've cleaned the drive and this is happening on more than one tape.
>There are no tape alerts being shown right now on the autoloader. Could
>this be a hardware problem with the drive?
>
>Thanks,
>Brian
>
>
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