Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!emory!hubcap!ncrcae!sauron!wescott
From: wescott@Columbia.NCR.COM (Mike Wescott)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ncr
Subject: Re: How to make the streamer stream?
Message-ID: <2191@sauron.Columbia.NCR.COM>
Date: 15 Jun 90 13:38:54 GMT
References: <1990Jun14.190735.918@is.uu.no>
Sender: news@sauron.Columbia.NCR.COM
Reply-To: wescott@micky.Columbia.NCR.COM (Mike Wescott)
Organization: E&M-Columbia, NCR Corp, W Columbia, SC
Lines: 15

In article <1990Jun14.190735.918@is.uu.no> ra@is.uu.no (Robert Andersson) writes:
> I have been trying all sorts of ways to speed up our backups.  
> I do *not* want to use volcopy, I prefer doing backups on a file by file
> level.  This leaves me with tar/cpio (NCR supported software), and
> gnutar/pax/afio (from comp.unix.sources archives).

> The file system appears to be so slow that the backup programs fail to
> feed the streaming tape devices fast enough to make them stream.

That's correct. In general, seek times on the disk are enough to cause
the tape to stop.  The best performance (without writing something special)
comes with using a dd in the pipe with a large blocksize.
--
	-Mike Wescott
	 mike.wescott@ncrcae.Columbia.NCR.COM