Firestreamer: Unable to add 3TB Seagate GoFlex USB drive

[muhammadamin]

Hi

I have just installed the Firestreamer on DPM 2010 and attached 3TB Seagate GoFlex USB drive. I added the media as 3Tb drive but getting below errors. Does it not support 3TB drives?

09/22/2011 15:59:26 | Error | E029 | L1 | Unable to determine the type of the medium [drive://E:]: The medium is formatted with an unsupported physical sector size. | drive://E: |

09/22/2011 15:59:26 | Error | E025 | L1 | Unable to insert the medium [drive://E:] into a tape drive: The medium is formatted with an unsupported physical sector size. | drive://E: |

Please reply ASAP so we can complete our testing before buy the licenses.

Thanks

[jsf]

In drive media mode, Firestreamer only supports sector sizes of 512, 1024 and 2048. 3TB Seagate GoFlex seems to use 4096 (4K) sectors, which is not supported.

In drive media mode you would only have a single 3TB tape for a 3TB disk. I guess that you actually want the file media mode which alllows multiple tapes per disk. If so, watch the demo video on our website on how use it. There's no sector or disk size limitations there.

[muhammadamin]

Thanks for your quick reply. If I leave the drive as basic drive then it will not support more than 2 TB as MBR disks don't go beyond 2 TB as far as I know. I don't want to create multiple files on the disk. I want to assign 3 TB as 1 tape so it writes all the data to one sinngle USBb drive. if you know how to work with 3 TB then can you please write steps so I can test in our environment.

Thanks

[jsf]

The below applies to drive media only. The limitations do NOT apply to file media.

In theory, Firestreamer supports drives up to 8 TB in size. The limit is calculated as 2048 (2K, the maximum sector size) x 4,294,967,295 (the maximum number of sectors). Firestreamer doesn't care about MBR and uses the entire physical space on the disk. For example, you can create a 100 MB partition on a 1 TB disk, but Firestreamer will overwrite it and will use the entire 1 TB space. It will create a small (a few KB) partition for Readme.htm, but all the rest will be used for data.

4K sectors are not supported. You cannot use a disk with 4K sectors with Firestreamer unless you can change the sector size to a smaller value. For a 3 TB disk you would need either 1K or 2K sectors. With 512 byte sectors, the maximum possible disk size is 2 TB.

You can still use file media mode and create a single large tape on the disk. Just format the disk and follow the video, but create one tape instead of multiple ones, and specify the maximum size of the tape. See How many tapes of which sizes should I use?

[georgemidbust]

I am having this same issue with the same drives. I used to have 1TB drives, however, we out grew those drives and purchased the 3TB drives. We used to use drive media mode and when I try it with the 3TB drives the backups will not run and Firestreamer gives me the error E025 and E029. I found this forum post and see that the 3TB drives are not supported by Firestreamer in Drive Media Mode. Will it work in File Media Mode? Also, is there an update in the works that will support the larger drives? If so, when can we exprect it?

Thanks

[jsf]

File media mode works fine with hard disk drives of any size.

The next version of Firestreamer will not support drive media on HDD with 4K sectors, sorry. We consider it a low priority issue because we don't believe it's practical to have a few 2TB tapes in drive media mode. We recommend using file media. See How many tapes of which sizes should I use?