"Shoe-shining" with 60 meg Wangtek tape on Sys V 386 3.2.1

[Bill Mayhew]

I've been trying to figure out a way to prevent shoe-shining of the
tape (repeated short back-and-forth movement) on a 60 meg
Sperry/CMS Wangtek tape drive on my Sys V 386 3.2.1 system. I did

find /usr/local -name "*" -print | cpio -oc -C1024 > /dev/rmt/c0s0

The system has 8 megs of RAM, and there weren't many processes
running, so cpio should have gotten the whole 1 meg buffer (I
think??).  It took about 1/2 an hour to back up about 5 megs of
data from /usr/local.  Yuck!  Running the same hardware under the
DOS partiton with the CMS QIC streaming software backed up up 30 megs
in just under 6 minutes with the tape running continuously.

The tape control board and drive have the exact same part numbers
as the respective AT&T labeled Mountain tape drive parts.  The only
diff is the copyright sticker on the ROM on the controller board.

Any ideas?

==Bill==
-- 
Bill Mayhew      NEOUCOM Computer Services Department
Rootstown, OH  44272-9995  USA    phone: 216-325-2511
wtm at uhura.neoucom.edu   ....!uunet!aablue!neoucom!wtm
via internet: (140.220.001.001)