20GB 8MM tape drive on RS6000: Best settings?

Posted in 1998

Irwin Goldstein — Tue, 08 Sep 1998 00:32:36 GMT — source: Informix-list mailing list archive (1991-1998)

I just completed an install of a 20GB (40GB compressed) external 8MM differential SCSI tape drive on a RS6000/J40. I configured it for a blcok size of 64K through SMIT (it had defualted to 1K) and set the Informix tape block size to match. A level 0 archive which used to take 3.5 hours on an internal 5GB 8MM drive finished in just under a half hour! (About 10GB.) While I am quite pleased with the results, I'm also a bit skeptical. Has anyone had experience with this tape drive with Informix? Are the settings I used actually working? At some point in the near future I intend to restore the level 0 to another machine as a test, but in the meantime confirmation from someone else who has used/is using this drive would be nice. TIA, Irwin Goldstein Objective Software Systems, Inc.