Hi -

We are diving into Linux for the first time. Our goal is to create tar format LTO-5 tape backups of data sitting on a Windows 7 volume using Mint 13 to run the tar command, which is running in VMware Workstation on the same machine as Windows 7. Using VMware Workstation's settings we were able to share a volume on our Windows 7 host machine where some fairly large .mov (Quicktime) files ranging from 50MB to 3.6GB per file reside. Mint can see the shared volume by navigating to /mnt/hgfs/name_of_shared_volume.

Running the tar command from terminal produced an error "Cannot open: Input/output error" for only some of the source files, and we didn't begin seeing errors until about 20 minutes of archiving time had passed. When we try to re-run the tar command on the same source files the errors will occur in a similar pattern but when reading different source files. For reference, our tar command is:

tar -b 1024 -cvf /dev/st0 name_of_shared_volume

Besides the error messages, we were also disappointed to receive write speeds to the LTO-5 of only 35 - 50MB/sec. The drive is an HP Ultrium 3000 connected via 6GB/sec SAS. We're used to better performance.

The slow performance led us to investigte basic file copy performance between the Windows 7 host and the Mint 13 guest. Also disappointing. We saw the following using the same source files for testing:

Using Mint GUI, copy files from Windows 7 share to Mint Virtual Machine - started at 33 MB/sec, dropped to 20 MB/sec
Using Mint GUI, copy files from Windows 7 share to same Windows 7 share (presumably data is passing through Mint/VM) - started at 19MB/sec, dropped to 14 MB/sec
Using Windows 7, copy files on Windows 7 volume to same Windows 7 volume - started at 146 MB/sec, dropped to 100 MB/sec

We are wondering if the slow data bandwidth and tar errors are related, or if they are separate issues and what we might try in order to resolve both.

Some specs regarding our system:

Windows 7 Ultimate running on host machine
Mint 13 Kernel 3.2.0-23-generic running on Virtual Machine
Mint running in VMware Workstation 8.0.4 build-744019
VMware Tools - Most recent version installed
Virtual Machine configured to use 2 cores & 4GB RAM
Workstation is an HP Z800 - 12 x 2.93Ghz cores, 24 MB RAM

Thank you!

Marco Bario
Creative Science
Sherman Oaks, CA

Mint13 uses gnome3, which (my opinion) isn't ready for prime time. Try Mint13 (Maya) with mate. It uses gnome 2 with appropriate mocifications for up to date machines.

Or you might try dropping back to mint11. It's a really good distro that uses gnome 2.
littlejoe5