The user's guide for the Dell PowerVault 100T DAT 72 tape drive recommends against using tar (see quoted text below). Does anyone have any experience
with this product and can advise whether we should avoid tar? Thank you for
your help.
The concern they have is valid, as tar defaults to using a tiny block size (512 or 2048 bytes, depending), which will cause the tape drive to start and stop rather than stream.
Fortunately, you can either pipe tar into dd to change the blocksize, or else change the blocksize to something larger using the -b (--block-size for gnutar) option. For what it's worth, I've been using a blocksize of 126 (* 512, or 63K) with DLT drives for years now. Why 63K is (or was) faster than 32K or 64K or other values is not at all clear to me :-), so do your own testing to see.
-- -Chuck
_______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
