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Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2004 22:24:16 -0500
From: Dan Nelson <dnelson@allantgroup.com>
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Subject: Re: Tape xfers topping out at 10K per transaction?
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In the last episode (Oct 06), Kevin A. Pieckiel said:
> I've got an Exabyte M2 connected to my system.  I'm running version
> 5.2.1 and have seen this drive do 64K transfers with "systat -vm"
> before (although that was under version 4.9).  I can't for the life
> of me find out why I'm only getting 10K per transaction while I'm
> reading from my tape now.  At the rate it's going, it will take over
> 10 hours to read through the entire thing.  I know the tape drive is
> capable of reading an entire tape in about three hours.

Tar defaults to a 10k blocksize.  When creating tapes, use the 'b'
flag to specify blocksize in 512-byte units.  For a 64k blocksize:
"tar cvbf 128 /dev/sa0 /usr"

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson@allantgroup.com