In reply to:

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I have found that with compression on, my 35/70Gb DLT drive stores about 31Gb of MP3s per tape and with compression off, it stores 35Gb. The compression must have some sort of overhead which, in the case of MP3s, increases the file size. Backing up of already compressed files is noticably slower if drive compression is enabled too.

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All Hardware compression on tape drives tends to do this. If you send it compressed data, it will enlarge the dataset. Software compression in tape drive backups is always going to do a better job, if for no other reason than the fact that the compressor on the computer is going to have access to more data to work with, and more advanced code.

I honestly don't know WHY hardware compression is even included anymore... It's the first thing I turn off.