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> Can you sustain 750 MB/s? It’s not so easy in practice. You throw away tape capacity if you get buffer underruns.

The drive doesn't pause while the buffer fills again? Considering the price of the drives, I find it very surprising that they don't do that.

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> The drive doesn't pause while the buffer fills again?

The drive does stop, and it runs at different speeds depending on how fast you are feeding it data. However, this process wastes tape capacity as you switch speeds.

Thus you should pick one speed that's fast enough and stick to it.

I don't understand how stopping or switching speeds wastes tape capacity. Are you not talking about storage capacity but some other type of capacity?

No, they stop, rewind, and accelerate again, causing massive mechanical wear.

The higher-end tape devices are capable of running at slower speeds to better match the rate you're feeding data to it to avoid this.

Yes. But it was argued that they could just stop and wait for the buffer. As said, they do, but you don't want them doing so.

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