document updated 13 years ago, on Mar 11, 2011
My goal is to get statistics about a tape drive, WHILE it's in use (ie. while a backup is running), to confirm that it's actually running properly. (ufsdump doesn't give very good indication at all)
Possible app-level tools that might give at least SOME stats:
- sar(1)
- iostat(1M)
- iostat -Imnxz 1
^^^^ that works pretty well, actually!
for a specific drive, this works:
iostat -Imnx 1 | perl -nle 'print if /^\s*[a-z]|rmt/'
various low-level man pages regarding the backup tape drives
- st(7D) — driver for SCSI tape devices
- mtio(7i) — general magnetic tape interface