On Friday, 17 March 2000 at  9:23:05 +0200, Jarkko Hermanni Teppo wrote:
> Hello!
>
> This is probably a stupid question but here goes anyway;
>
> What are the typical values for tape block sizes for tar
> and dump for the following tape drives:
> 8mm Exabyte (8200), 1600bpi 9-track, QIC-150, HP 9144 (HCD),
> HP 9145 and DDS-I.

tar traditionally has a 20 block (of 512 byte) blocksize.  I've found
that increasing this up to 128 blocks can significantly improve
performance on slow machines, but it can present a number of gotchas,
especially if you want to exchange tapes with other operating systems.

Greg
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