I presume this tool can't decrease that time for an individual tape, but it decreases the total time with a huge degree of parallelism.
I wonder, what is that degree of parallelism? That is, how many tapes can be initialized at once? I presume it's large but I'm not familiar with 'tape libraries'.
Also, to the author: have you thought about putting an explicit license on your script?
I just wanted to "show" that big vendors don't care about solving very practical issues: some companies still rely on backups on physical tapes, but the current versions of firmware of most libraries don't allow optimizing automatically the tapes. That's quite a problem when maybe a customer just bought 2,000 cartridges.
About the parallelism, it's quite simple: a tape needs to be read and optimized by a _tape drive_[0]. Libraries can be configured with a various number of drives, and the script manages all the available ones using the special device of the library and the `mtx` tool on Linux.
Also, you're right: it's impossible to decrease the optimization time of a single tape.[1][2][3]
Ah, while writing this, I noticed that HPE may have the appropriate tool on their autoloader.[4]
[0]: https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/3MD86RLJ
[1]: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/ts4500-tape-library?topic=drives...
[2]: https://www.quantum.com/globalassets/products/tape-storage-n...
[3]: https://docs.oracle.com/en/storage/tape-storage/storagetek-s...
It's silly that vendors don't have a tool for this (or maybe one vendor does, but doesn't advertise it well).
I don't personally don't use tapes, but it's good of you to share this script.
