Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote: No. You're mixing two different things. The speed of the drive is very much dependant on keeping the silos full. Otherwise it will go into start-stop mode, in which the speed gets horrenously slow. And I wouldn't be surprused finding out that a uVAX I can't keep a TK50 streaming. It's a slow beast. A "modern" PDP-11 is much better. However, streaming or not should not affect capacity as such. Block sizes on the other hand do. Doing small blocks drastically reduces capacity, since you have inter-block gaps on the tape. Well, from a performance point of view, both reads and writes should be optimized. Capactiry-wise shouldn't matter. Tape will start-stop and rewind as needed for both reads and writes. I'm looking through TK50 manuals, but can't find anything about inter-block gaps. The TU81 (for example) can have two different sizes of IBGs, which will affect capacity, and which can be related to tape speed. As I said, I can't find anything like this for the TK50, but if there is, it might cause what you are thinking of (except that the IBG is small by default when in start-stop mode on the TU81, and you have to explicity ask for a larger IBG). Other comments about TK50s? Well, they need a lot of cleaning, and you have to disassemble them when the pick-up skips the arm, which is pretty common. But anyone who have been playing with these drives probably knows this already. :-) Otherwise they keep working pretty reliably. Johnny -- Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: bqt at softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol