On Tue, 15 Feb 2000, mark wrote:
AFAIK The interleaving thing was born of expediency, for all the backup product vendors: for backing up from slow individual clients to tapes that only work efficiently when streaming.
What are people's experiences with non-streaming performance ofvarious kind of tape drives? Do some mechanisms handle lack of streaming better than others? For example, I would think that a DLT7000 would suffer horribly if you don't feed it data fast enough because it takes a relatively long time to stop the tape, rewind and reposition, and bring the tape back up to speed.
It's all buffer dependent. Early 4000s didn't have enough buffer to do this. If you're draining the buffer, then you're not sending data fast enough. So the drive needs to be able to buffer data at tape speed for long enough to go through a stop,rewind,start cycle. I've never noticed any real penalty on a 7000. Their buffers seem to be large enough to not have the tape slow down the machine..