I didn't know -- or perhaps remember -- that you had to match the feed against the speed, sort of like the way you had to be very careful about burning CD-Rs in the old days, but that makes perfect sense.
I have been fearfully realizing that I will soon need tape backup for my next project and this is helpful. Now I am wondering if a RAID 0 of multiple HDDs could provide the ~300 MB/s speed needed.
You do not have to match the speed, but you should.
Sending the data fast enough to the drive will reduce both the total time required for backup, when the drive is active, and it will also avoid starting and stopping a lot the drive during the transfer.
Both eliminating the start-stop cycles and reducing the total active time will increase the life of your tape drive.
On my server I have 128 GB of DRAM, which makes it extremely easy to ensure maximum speed without wearing a SSD.
When the backup starts, I create an 80-GB RAM disk, larger than the up to 60 GB archives in which I collect the files sent to backup.
With less memory one could either use smaller chunks or use a SSD instead of the RAM disk, but that seems wasteful.
Then the archive files are buffered in the RAM disk and written in one command, without pauses.
I have been fearfully realizing that I will soon need tape backup for my next project and this is helpful. Now I am wondering if a RAID 0 of multiple HDDs could provide the ~300 MB/s speed needed.