Michael, Look at the b option to increase your blocking size. Use man tar on your host to check for the fine print. If your tar program will let you do it, aim for 256K block sizes.
len -----Original Message----- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Michael Green Sent: Monday, July 09, 2007 10:47 AM To: ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU Subject: [ADSM-L] tar with LTO2 This post is a bit offtopic, but still I decided to send ti here because it's probably one of the very few places where large amount backup administrators that are invested in IBM equipment come together. My question is related to using old school tar with IBM LTO2 drives. I was asked to archive a rather large directory (over 200GB) to tape using tar and put it into vault for indefinite period of time. My equipment is as following: Linux x64 (IBMtape driver), 3584 Libr with IBM 3580 LTO2 FC-attached drives. I've tried to load a tape into IBMtape0 drive using 3584 Library Specialist WebGUI and IBMtapeutil then I tried to write a small directory '/var/log' to the tape as following tar cvpf /dev/IBMtape0 /var/log and it seemed to work. I could also tar xvfp /dev/IBMtape0 and read the resulting files. However, tar'ing the actual target directory revealed that the data is flowing at extremely low rates - less than 100kb/sec. Any ideas? -- Warm regards, Michael Green