MCGUIRE@GRIN2.BITNET (06/04/87)
> Date: Wed, 03 Jun 87 08:09:35 EDT > From: Mike Sieweke <MSIEWEKE@GTRI01> > Subject: 6250 tape drives > > Someone wanted to know if a single 6250 bpi tape drive would speed backups > compared to 2 TU80's. _Yes!_ > > The TU80 is one of the slowest tape drives sold by DEC. Practically any > vacuum-column tape drive will be faster. (By slow, I mean backup only > writes to it at 25 ips. It can go 125ips streaming, which is pretty quick) My experience is different. We used to use a TU80 for backup. It was capable of 125ips streaming, if we used the correct combinations of BACKUP qualifiers such as /BUFFER and /BLOCK, and SET RMS qualifiers. The difference may be the environment. If you're backing up large datasets, you'll probably get 125ips. If you're backing up lots of little files, you may be slowed down too much by the disk and processor overhead of the directory traversal to get 125ips. Ed