I've recieved an LTO3 tape of data from a customer that's been written
with tar, I've determined the block size on the tape is 10240. (Which I
find quite odd.....)

Sadly my 3582 is attached to another system and I will not be able to
locally attach it to the target server for this data (about 400gig) I
have a gig network between the two servers, and have been attempting to
do the restore with the followign command.

LTO3 drive is set to variable block size.

>From the target server:

mytarget:# ssh -l ktelep tapeserver "dd if=/dev/rmt0 ibs=10240
obs=4096k" | tar -xvf -

Performance on this restore is less than expected. I can restore
sysback tapes with this same amount of data in 1/4 of the time. I'd
like to point fingers at the odd blocksize (I've alwaysed used 256k for
LTO3 backups) but I'd like to be sure.

Any suggestions on how to speed up this restore?????

Kurt