We have 2 3590B drives and 2 3590E drives in our 3494.  We have separate
storage pools set up for the two types of drives, since you cannot
freely move labelled media between the drives.  A tape labelled by a
3590E drive cannot be read by a 3590B drive.  A tape labelled by a 3590B
drive can be read by a 3590E drive, but cannot be written by a 3590E
drive.  As we have been migrating from 3590B to 3590E media, we remove
excess 3590B scratch volumes from the 3590B storage pool and re-label
them into the 3590E storage pool.

In addition to using the 3590B drives to move data from 3590B to 3590E
media, we write our database backups to the 3590B drives.

> Scottish Provident is considering adding one or more 3590E (new, higher
> capacity) drives to the ADSM hardware (3494 library with two 3590B drives).
> I think one way to use both old and new drives at the same time, is to use
> e.g. the 3590B drives for the tapepool and the 3590E for the copypool.
>
> What I am wondering is: If a tape in the copypool (3590E) becomes empty,
> can it go back in the general scratch pool and will a 3590B be able to
> initialise it? Or would that need two separate scratch pools too?
>
> Any other comments or suggestions?


--
Tom Bell                                    tom.bell AT westgeo DOT com
Tom Bell                                    tom.bell AT westgeo DOT com
Western Geophysical                         office:     (713) 689-2203
10001 Richmond, Room 3705                   fax:        (713) 689-2758
Houston, TX  77042                          pager:      (713) 415-0419

If it were easy, anyone could do it.