On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 15:54, Jerry Franz <jfranz at freerun.com> wrote: > tar is normally screaming fast unless you use bzip2 compression (or gzip > compression on an underpowered CPU). > > Provide details: What are you tarring, how are you invoking tar, what > hardware are you running on (hard drive types, cpu type, etc). > Thanks, Jerry, I was in fact using bzip2: $ tar -cjf dcl-2010-12-07.tbz dcl-2010-12-07/ I don't really need compressed, just archived (moving Linux files via FAT-formatted external hard drive) so I ditched the j option and it's now screaming along at almost 80 MiB/sec. Thanks! -- Dotan Cohen http://gibberish.co.il http://what-is-what.com