tape records

[utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!unix-wizards]

>From eps at UCLA-Security Sat Oct 31 21:04:08 1981
A friend of mine likes to write tapes with 60K block sizes
under VMS (saving one tape in four).  This ties up the massbus
for 3-4 seconds at a time, locking out disk drives (which get
rather upset and start complaining about data lates).  I don't
know of any Unix programs that like records larger than 10K,
but I suspect this is only because most tape munching programs
allocate their buffers with fixed sizes(?), not to mention the
fact that there are an awful lot of 11s in the world...
something about "compatibility" I think.

					--Eric