Issues with AIT-3, anyone?

[Tulio Guimarães da Silva]

Hello all,

   I´m having some trouble with a Sony SDX-700V AIT-3 tape unit. I 
described some of the trouble in -hardware, but I guess most of them are 
-performance issues.
  I was going to x-post the message to this list, but before that I´ll 
rather ask if anyone is having any trouble with these units in 
5.3-RELEASE. Also, does this version support AIT-3? I already searched 
the archives, but found nothing that could be of use (i´ll admit, maybe 
I missed something :P ).
  If there´s no know issues, then I´ll feel more prone to post that 
message in here, since it´s a bit long. But just to advance something: 
I´ve found that running "rsh [remote] tar -cvf - dir/ >/dev/sa0" is 
noticeably faster than "[remote]# tar -cvf mymachine:/dev/sa0 dir". 
Also, could there be anything wrong with "cat file.tar.gz >/dev/sa0"?
  These may seem dumb questions, but we used these flawlessly for some 
time with DDS-* tapes, but are not working with AIT...
  Ok, thanks in advance for any help. Cheers,

Tulio