As you summised, I used the verbose switch (because I like watching filenames scrolling quickly ).

Several thousands of petite files took just over five minutes. The "tar" file is residing on the dos drive (checked with "ls" command in the /mnt directory.

Good call on the "umount", almost forgot in my excitment (this ranks up there with upgrading both the empeg & TiVo as one of the Linux highlights in my life. Thank you.