tape drive performing slow with star?

From: T.T. Harris (spamwontsurvive.this_at_iwont.get.it)
Date: 02/06/04 

Date: Fri, 6 Feb 2004 15:41:29 +0100

Hi all!

We are using a Sun Fire 280R with an internal DDS4 tape drive on Solaris 8.
The system was backing up about 25 gig in documents and some miscellaneous
other stuff to this tapedrive using ufsdump.

The tape transfer rate was a "staggering" +/-3000 KBps.

I figured that's too low, so we recently installed star.
Now, using this command:
/opt/csw/bin/star -c -fifostats -time blocks=126 fs=512m file=/dev/rmt/0
/export/home/

the transfer rate has actually dropped to about +/-1600 KBps (if doing a
full backup, else it's only around 1000).

Could someone tell me what a reasonable transfer rate would be and how I
could achieve that rate (preferably with star)?

Thanks loads in advance!

TT