Re: [SLUG] DDS2 Tape drive and compression

[Crossfire <xfire@xxxxxxxx>]

Barrie Hall was once rumoured to have said:
>    Hi,
>     
>    I have an AIWA GD-8000 DDS2 tape drive connected up and working nicely. My
>    problem is that I can't seem to work out whether it is using hardware
>    compression or not. The jumper on the drive labelled "disabled
>    compression" is not jumpered. I have issued an 'mt compression on', but I
>    still can't seem to store more than about 3.9G on a DDS2 120m tape using
>    'tar cvf /dev/nst0 /u1'.
>
>    What am I doing wrong??

You're trying to use compression in the first place.  *ugh!*

Tapes + Compression == bad karma.

It means one bad block on the tape has the potential to make large
amounts of the tape unreadable/unusable rather than just a little bit
of data.

Just say no to tape compression.

However, if you really must... check your data and guage its
compressability.  If its already compressed, then its highly unlikely
that you can get any gain from a hardware compression system.

C.
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