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From: jeremy@perf2.asd.sgi.com (Jeremy Higdon)
Newsgroups: comp.periphs
Subject: Re: exabyte record size limit
Message-ID: <85054@sgi.sgi.com>
Date: 12 Feb 91 08:28:56 GMT
References: <1991Feb8.154740.11155@helios.physics.utoronto.ca> <JEREMY.91Feb10161401@chook.ua.oz.au>
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In article <JEREMY.91Feb10161401@chook.ua.oz.au>, jeremy@cs.adelaide.edu.au (Jeremy Webber) writes:
> Very small transfers also seemed to use more *tape* than larger transfers.  I'm
> not sure why.  1K blocks got less than half the storage on the tape that 64K
> blocks did.

This is because the Exabyte writes bands of nulls while waiting for input.
The default is for it to write up to 7 bands, and each band is 8k.
Depending on your motion threshold, the speed of the Exabyte, and the
turnaround time of your application, I could see you getting far
less storage with a 1K transfer size.