LTO tape drive speed slow on Redhat 4

[Fernando Braga]

On 6/16/06, Pauli Borodulin <pauli.borodulin at uta.fi> wrote:
> mcclnx mcc wrote:
>
> > LTO tape drive speed supposely should around 15MB/sec
> > -30MB/sec.  does anyone know how to make it run
> > faster?
>
> By default, Tar uses block size of 20*512B = 10kB. This is really small and
> is a probable reason for your slowness. Most LTO systems in use operate most
> efficiently with a 64kB blocksize, so try using that instead. First
> configure the drive for variable block size by running "mt setblk 0" (you
> may need to define the device with the -f parameter). Then use "tar -b128
> ..." to make the tar archives. It is also necessary to use the same
> parameters when reading the tapes.

I normally user tar -b1024 ... with LTO2. I like to keep it busy.
Performance in my system is around 40MB/s

-- 
Fernando M. Braga
Telemacro Informações e Serviços
+55 82 2121-2100