On Wed, 2004-11-03 at 12:50, Dan Brown wrote:

> During a backup, or a flush, the tape drive writes data for 4 seconds, then 
> rewinds for 1 second, then writes for 4 seconds, then rewinds for 1 second, 
> etc.
> This seems like a good way to wear out a drive.

I had a very similar "shoe polishing" problem when I went from DDS to a
DLT VS160. I solved it by not having a tape in the drive when doing the
backup, then doing the flush when the system is (pretty much) idle --
giving it all to Amanda.

There also seemed to be a problem with sustained disk transfer speed.
The IDE's (with DMA on and using an 80 conductor ribbon cable) just
couldn't keep up with the tape. SATA's and SCSI's do.

It still won't stream when writing small (<5MB or so) files, but writing
from the holding disk, there aren't many of those.

-- 
Glenn English
ghe AT slsware DOT com