I had a client once that was experiencing high enough errors with their tapes and drives (3494-3590E drives) that Imation actually asked to take a few tapes for testing. They came back saying that the tapes had high amounts of a black powder on the tape that appeared to be printer toner. Upon looking at the computer floor again, it turns out there was a laser printer in the room that happened to be sitting partially over a perforated floor tile and was gettng blown on constantly by the AC. Printer was moved to another location, and errors were largely eliminated.
I'd take another good look around the room to make sure there's nothing else that could be causing environmental contamination.... regards, Paul ----- Original Message ----- From: "Zoltan Forray/AC/VCU" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU> Sent: Wednesday, June 01, 2005 11:12 AM Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] LTO2 unreliability
Environment is not an issue. This is in a *REAL* computer room (raised floors, UPS/conditioned electricity, industrial-strength cooling). "Kauffman, Tom" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent by: "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU> 06/01/2005 01:00 PM Please respond to "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU> To ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU cc Subject Re: [ADSM-L] LTO2 unreliability Zoltan -- I have an IBM 3584 with 10 LTO2 drives, installed last August. So far, I've had one service call -- one of the drives swallowed a tape and wouldn't let go of it. If I remember correctly, we got the tape out but replaced the drive just as a precaution. I pump something over 3 TB of data through the library daily, most to LTO2 tapes. All my offsite copies are written to LTO1 tapes (with the LTO2 drives), and runs to about 1.6 TB daily. Could you be having an environmental problem that's contributing to the failures? Tom Kauffman NIBCO, Inc -----Original Message----- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Zoltan Forray/AC/VCU Sent: Wednesday, June 01, 2005 10:54 AM To: ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU Subject: LTO2 unreliability Are all LTO2 drives as unreliable as I have been experiencing ? We installed our first 3583 with 2-LTO2 drives, about a year ago. Of the two drives, both have been replaced at least one. I just replace one of the replacements, again (wouldn't power up). The first replacement was after about a month of usage ! We just upgraded our configuration by adding 2-drives to the existing library and purchasing another 3583 with 4-drives. These have now been in use for about 2-weeks. Of the 2-new drives added to the old library, one of them is already showing signs of problems (shows A! on the panel, which the book says drive hardware fault). Of my 9+ years of experience with 3590 (B and E) drives, I have never seen so many failures. Especially considering the amount of tapes that have been fed through the 3590 drives (the 4-E drives run through over 200-mounts a day). Is this normal ? Also, no I do not push what I consider a lot of data through these drives (~ 1TB per week). What kind of experiences do other folks have with IBM 3580 LTO2 drives, when it comes to reliability ?