Hello Shane,

Yes there are a number of bad 3570 cartridges around.
From the earlier cartridges there a few ranges which are suspect.
How can you identify them ?

On the back of the cartridge you will find a series of numbers which look
like this:


         LOT #           date code
           | |                |      |
           | |                |      |
          /  \               /       \
1.8.9   6319    1847082797

On the newer cartridges it looks a bit different !

The suspect lots are: 47. 53, 63 and 74.

We have had a lot of trouble with lot 47 and lot 63 and we are in the
process of
getting rid of these cartridges. We had a total of 200 of these which were
more
or less filled with data until we and finally IBM recognized that there was
a problem.

What problems did we have ? Lost VCR data and all kinds of I/O errors.

Hope this brings some clarity in your situation...

Greetinx,

Robert -

Robert van Bussel
Systeemprogrammeur Centrale Systemen
OD/IT Exploitatie
Open Universiteit Nederland
+31-45-5762515




> Date:    Mon, 19 Oct 1998 09:25:04 +1000
>From:    Shane <shanesmith AT WESTPAC.COM DOT AU
>Subject: Magstar Tapes for 3570

>Hi,

>We had a few hardware failures on a 3570 unit, and the IBM guy came and =
>fixed it up. He upgraded the microcode to the latest level also.

>We are still getting a stack of VCR errors and also some tapes seem to =
>have the barcode in the wrong place which gives the unit a hard time. =
>The IBM maintenance man said that there was a bad batch of tapes....

>Is this true? If so, what are the batch numbers, what bad affects do =
>these tapes exhibit, and how do we get them replaced.

>IBM, I know you read this forum. I got no response from the last email =
>from you (SCSI sense codes), perhaps you can answer this one.=20

>Regards
>Shane