On Jan 29, 2009, at 3:47 PM, Charles Soto wrote: > So I'm a bit confused by the Admin Guide. Under SAM 4.6, is the > default > drive cleaning method to rely on SAM to do this whenever a "drive > needs > cleaning" signal is received? Or are we supposed to enable "Auto > Clean" on our SL500?
We do have 'auto cleaning' enabled inside the SL500 and samfs ist setup to not request cleaning itself. You should enable either one or the other. However, so far, no drive has requested cleaning (no tape errors neither), and I was told that LTO3 drives do not need much cleaning unless you can't get them streaming. We use two drives now for over 2 years and no problems or cleaning. With bufsize set large enough, the tapes stream at full speed (80 MB/s). Still I rather would like a drive to request cleaning at least once, so I know it works. A Sun engineer told me that samfs cannot know if a tape drive needs cleaning, it will do so after a configured amount of tape loads. I rather like the drive to decide itself when it needs cleaning, because using a cleaning tape shortens the drive lifetime. Best, Peter
