> As a last possibility: These tape drives do their best to keep
> streaming ("running"). If you are feeding them not enough data, the
> drive will start to write less tracks on the tape in order to keep
> running. This will reduce tape capacity. If the data rate is falling
> below a certain (secret I think) limit, the drive will do start/stop
> mode.

Not true unless you have a very old model.  The first gen had half the
buffer space (4MB I think) and would decrease compression (not tracks)
when inbound data dropped below a certain amount.  It only writes one
track at a time in any case.

This was posted to a Quantum forum by Dick Stone (from Quantum).

> > This behavior applies only to those DLT7000 models with 4MB cache
> > buffer. Very few of these models were released into the market. The
> > designation for the DLT7000 models is TH6XY-ZZ, where "X", "Y", and
> > "ZZ" represent model variations. The model designation for the
> > DLT7000 with 4MB cache have either an letter A or B for the "Y"
> > variable. All other models have 8MB cache and do not use rate
> > dependent compression

-- 
Darren Dunham                                           ddunham AT taos DOT com
Unix System Administrator                    Taos - The SysAdmin Company
Got some Dr Pepper?                           San Francisco, CA bay area
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