Just trying to get set up with tape backup after the first time in years and am struggling with slow writes - hopefully someone can point me in the right direction?
I bought an eBay Dell LTO5 drive, Dell SAS card, brand new SAS cable. I had some LTO4 tapes from a previous run, so I unwrapped a fresh one and tried to dump 300GB of work-in-progress code, object files, builds - a few hundred thousand, mostly small files. It's all from a brand new system with a Crucial T705 SSD.
I'm on Windows, which I know makes this difficult. I've tried out both Uranium Backup and Iperius, and both seem to write very slowly - reporting 150MB per minute, which is too slow to be useful. The tape stops and starts all the time, it rarely settles into the high-speed whine that I recognise as a constant write.
When I last used tape regularly on Linux, I got this behaviour if I didn't put a big buffer between the outgoing data and the tape. But on Windows I'm expecting these all-in-one 199 EUR programs should take care of that, right?
If I get really stuck I will try booting Linux off USB for a bit and try writing some test data with Linux's tools which I know a bit better.
So is it buffering? Is it a broken tape drive? Is it LTO4 cartridges in an LTO5 drive? If anyone has a small personal-sized LTO backup regime from Windows that's working better than this, please tell me how you did it ๐