[Gllug] Sony Tape Drive

[t.clarke]

Hi
Just picked up belatedly on various posts on this.

My experience (with Unix admittedly) with tape drives, for what its worth:

1) make sure the controller is talking to the device at the right speed

2) tar often does not supply the data to the drive nearly quick enough unless
you have a really fast machine

3) use a really big tar block size - the default is usually too small

4) If you aren't suplying the data fast enough for the drive to 'stream' it
will spend an awful lot of time re-positioning the tape and its performance
will thus go the drain as well as putting more wear and tear on the tape

5) I found in one situation that a tar piped through to 'dd' with a big fat
block size worked better than tar'ing straight to the device

6) You could try doing a 'dd' of the raw filesystem direct to the tape-drive,
and see what kind of performance this yields.  This is possibly the fastest way
of delivering real data to the tape.

7) If you have spare disc space (as we do) the following may work well:
 a) tar or cpio to a disc-file
 b) dd the disc-file to the tape


Tim

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