I have a Dell Powervault 114T with an IBM Ultrium 3 drive (SCSI) drive, and I have a batch of tapes that I can only write 210GB to. I did get the tapes from eBay, so I guess it isn't that surprising if they are all junk. The entire batch are imation media.
I do have two NEW maxell tapes and I can write around 380GB to them using tar no problem.
Here are some details:
OS - Debian 8 - SMP Debian 3.16.7-ckt11-1 (2015-05-24) x86_64 GNU/Linux
SCSI Host Card - LSI Logic / Symbios Logic 53c1030 PCI-X Fusion-MPT Dual Ultra320 SCSI
All of the imation tapes pass a basic test using:
IBM Tape Diagnostic Tool Standard Edition - Version: 8.0.1.20141014
but this is only a basic read/write test from what I understand.
If I try and do a full write, ALL of them get to around 210GB and then fail. I have set the drive compression off using ITDT, and when I run the full write test I use un-compressable data option, with 256k "blocksize".
Using ITDT using the "tape usage" option, all of the tapes reported 0 thread counts, so it leads me to believe that they were erased, and the internal flash chip erased as well.
I understand that if the drive works with a brand new tape that it isn't a drive issue, but it just seems odd that all 10 of these imation tapes would all fail right at the 210GB mark.
I have 2 other Fiber Channel LTO3 drives and I get the same results with those drives as well.
Should I just junk all the tapes that fail the write test?
Is there some way to 'format' a tape? (Erase fails with an error code 6 on the front of the drive on the imation tapes)
Any insight would help, this has been annoying me for a while.
