Effective use of Tape

The I/O rate and efficiency with which the tape is used depends both on hardware and software. Ed Frank made a study of this subject using an Exabyte 8200, an Exabyte 8500 and a Hewlett Packard 2000 Digital Audio Tape. He studied the effect of a number of software aspects including:-

• Physical record size

• Logical record size

• Zebra overhead

A copy of his report can be found in:-

.../doc/soft/zebra_tape_io.doc

In sumary his conclusions were that:-

• The best hardware was the Exabyte 8500

• The Zebra overhead (both in speed and space) were not excessive.

• The FZ block size should be 15,360 bytes.