On Thursday 08 March 2007, Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
>On Thu, 8 Mar 2007 at 2:07pm, Guy Dallaire wrote
>
>> There's no easy way to tell wether it's shoeshinning or not. The
>> performance is fine for us. Were not backing up a lot of data. I
>> should probably put a better SCSI card in the server though. It never
>> occured to me that the LTO could not throttle to lower than 20 Mb/sec.
>
>The performance may be fine, but shoeshining is Bad for both media and
>drive life.

That needs capitalization for the whole word BAD Joshua.  Having heard my 
old drive that used DC-6150 tapes doing that, all that wah, wow, wah 
stuff is not only scary, its very bad for the tapes and the drive, 
multiplying the wear and tear on the heads and tapes by factors of at 
least 3 or more.  The ideal situation is for the drive to never stop once 
started until its done.  Only then does one pass=one pass.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Any fool can paint a picture, but it takes a wise person to be able to 
sell it.