OT: DAT drives

[Ben Pfaff]

Mark Szidik - Michigan Library Consortium <szidikm@mlc.lib.mi.us> writes:

> I am just a little curious as to why my DAT drive (using dump) writes
> about 1 MB/s using a DDS1 tape (90Meter) and writes to tape at 4.4MB/s
> using a DDS3 tape?

I want to know, too.  Mine only writes 1.2MB/s to DDS-3 tape (and
400kB/s to DDS-[12] tape)!  But, seriously, that's normal.  Why
it happens, I'm don't know.  Here's a wild guess: the speed of
tape motion past the head is fixed, but bits are stored more
densely on DDS-3 tape.