I suppose so in some ways, but shoe shining will prematurely wear out your LTO tapes and drives.
The L in LTO is for linear: when the tape writes its traveling at over 100 inches per second. Compare to helical scan tape systems like VHS and DAT/DDS where the tape heads are moving very quickly past the tape but the tape itself is not really fast at all. So if the write buffer empties, the drive has to decelerate the tape, wind it back quickly, then accelerate it so it's at full speed when it's at the location to write a new block.
I might recommend DDS for the 3rd World ^_^. It's what I used until it fell too far behind hard disk sizes.
The L in LTO is for linear: when the tape writes its traveling at over 100 inches per second. Compare to helical scan tape systems like VHS and DAT/DDS where the tape heads are moving very quickly past the tape but the tape itself is not really fast at all. So if the write buffer empties, the drive has to decelerate the tape, wind it back quickly, then accelerate it so it's at full speed when it's at the location to write a new block.
I might recommend DDS for the 3rd World ^_^. It's what I used until it fell too far behind hard disk sizes.