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> Can you sustain 750 MB/s? It’s not so easy in practice. You throw away tape capacity if you get buffer underruns. The drive doesn't pause while the buffer fi

by jolmg 7y ago

> Can you sustain 750 MB/s? It’s not so easy in practice. You throw away tape capacity if you get buffer underruns. The drive doesn't pause while the buffer fills again? Considering the price of the drives, I find it very surprising that they don't do that.

namibj 7y ago
No, they stop, rewind, and accelerate again, causing massive mechanical wear.
- Yeroc 7y ago
  The higher-end tape devices are capable of running at slower speeds to better match the rate you're feeding data to it to avoid this.
  - namibj 7y ago
    Yes. But it was argued that they could just stop and wait for the buffer. As said, they do, but you don't want them doing so.
klodolph 7y ago
> The drive doesn't pause while the buffer fills again? The drive does stop, and it runs at different speeds depending on how fast you are feeding it data. However, this process wastes tape capacity as you switch speeds.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Thus you should pick one speed that's fast enough and stick to it.
- jolmg 7y ago
  I don't understand how stopping or switching speeds wastes tape capacity. Are you not talking about storage capacity but some other type of capacity?