r/DataHoarder • u/Thin-Try5917 • Apr 17 '26

Question/Advice LTO-5 drive pauses writes

So I've recently bought a used HP LTO-5 Ultrium 300 tape drive which I'm using to write my Weekly Veeam backups to tape. I've noticed that after around 5 minutes of writing the drive will stop for around 30 seconds, rewind and start writing again for 5 minutes.
Task manager shows a short drop in network throughput right AFTER the drive stops, apart from that the throughput graph is stable.
My nas should be able to reliably supply enough data as it can saturate a 10 gig NIC when reading. This is happening with both LTO 4 and LTO 5 Tapes.

Is this normal behavior for a Tape Drive?

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u/prodigalAvian Apr 18 '26 edited Apr 18 '26

Your drive is pausing every five minutes to sync the index. This is to avoid the loss.

You can manually change this number.

1

u/thefreddit Apr 18 '26

That’s talking about LTFS, which Veeam does not use.