I have a Del 490 loaded with RHEL 5.2:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Client release 5.2 (Tikanga)

and I have a new SDLT220 tape drive attached via USB:

[root@ceeds1 bin]# mt -f /dev/st0 status
SCSI 2 tape drive:
File number=1, block number=0, partition=0.
Tape block size 0 bytes. Density code 0x48 (Quantum SDLT220).
Soft error count since last status=0
General status bits on (81010000):
EOF ONLINE IM_REP_EN
[root@ceeds1 bin]#

I run a couple of dumps and it asks for a 2nd tape part way into the 2nd dump... It's like I only got about 8GB of data on the tape. I did the bare-bones dump cmd (dump 0f /dev/nst0 /"filesys")... so I assume there are options to dump to get more data on the tape...

Anyone have some canned options to optimize the tape capacity?