Hi,

This is not strickly an question pertaining to the list but I'm sure
some of you have faced this issue: I just got a new ArcVault24
librarie with 2x LTO-3 tape drives and searching through the amanda
archives I found posts that claim that the default amanda 32k tape
blocksize is not really optimum for that sort of drive if I want to
avoid shoe-shining.

Hardware:
I've setup the default access device to the drives as non-compressing.
The library is hooked through a LSI U320 PCI-X scsi card to a 4
DualCore2 Xeon with 8GB of RAM running Debian/Etch running a 64bit
kernel 2.6.21.5-i686-64-smp. It should be beefy enough :)

Running amtapetype with different blocksize gives me ~386MB for
capacity (close enough to 400MB) but I never seem to get close to
streaming:

bs=     speed=
32k     50482 kps
128k    50531 kps
256k    50508 kps 
512k    50521 kps
1024k   50512 kps
2048k   15780 kps
4096k   15875 kps

Any hint on what I should try next?

And finally: is there a utility on Debian or Linux in general that
would allow me to see the IO transfer rate to character devices. I
know how to do this on Irix but dunno if it exists in the Linux
universe. 
(gratis irix trick: start osview and look for 'phread' and 'phwrite'
in the menu 'Other'. They give the aggregated physical IO transfer
rate to all character devices)

thanks jf
-- 
<° ><