> Many drives have an led tally on the front to indicate when the
> comnpressor is active.
>
> And no, amanda will not use it, and in fact cannot because once a lock
> on the drive is obtained, its not released until done.  Turning it
> off is best done via the dip switch or jumper settings programming of
> the drive.
>
> However, be aware that a tape written to with it on, will override the
> drives settings until such time as a block 1 write is forced and
> flushed to the media with the compression turned off.  And drives
> even vary in that behaviour from production runto production run.  I
> now have in service some tapes that were originally compressed, and a
> slightly earlier version of the ctl-96 Seagate drive than the one I
> started with, and even though the tape labels have been re-written
> with compression off, the led is on *until* a real data write starts.
> Those tapes didn't show that little foible until I had to replace the
> drive with a near identical one.

so if i turn off hardware compression but do not relabel my tapes amanda
will still think they are being written to using hardware aswell as software
compression until i relabel them?

doesn't sound right and i think i'm mistaken but thought i'd better clarify.

Tom