speeding up the tape drive

[Lane Okamoto <lane@KESTREL.ARPA>]

Has anyone done work on and/or is it possible to buffer up more data
before writing to the cartridge tape?

The way things are now, the tape has to start and stop (and rewind) so
much that it wastes a lot of time.  It takes about 3 hours to write a
DC600A tape, while on other systems I can write one in 25 minutes.
The only difference that I know of is the amount of buffering.  For
the Archive drives in the 3670 and 3675, the tape drive will keep the
tapes going as long as the host can keep sending it between 45 Kbytes
and 90 Kbytes of data per second.  It would be nice to allocate a
couple of megabytes of memory for buffering.

Thanks, lane                                lane@kestrel.arpa