Hi,
I have an LTO drive which I’ve been using for about 6 months to backup around 6TB at a time (lots of files around 2-10GB) . It’s always taken longer than I was expecting to complete. 15hours+ each time. I didn’t really look into it much until I checked the data sheet. The. transfer rate mentions that it should have been around 300MB/s transfer rate but was getting much less.
I came across the term shoe shining and did a bit of experimenting with mbuffer which seems to have solved the problem; reducing the time to around 5hours.
The tar command pipes to mbuffer, outputting to the tape drive.
tar -cf - . | sudo mbuffer -m 1G -P 100 -s 256k -o /dev/st0
Does it matter what the buffer size is, as long as it’s above 300MB (transfer speed) and what would happen if I increased the block size to 512k?