>Im at 3.1.2.50 and Ive noticed that tapes arent being put into readonly
>status anymore after I get tape read, media errors. I used to get a few a
>week, now it seems I get none put into reado status? Either my tapes all of
>a sudden turned perfect or something is wrong!
>Im on 3590 B11 drives in 3494, and at atape 5.0.1

We're at the same level and use the same hardware.  Maybe once every 8 weeks
we find a tape going readonly, as the drive microcode deems it over threshold.
(We went to the new microcode in December, and it's old tapes in the library
which exhibited the symptom since the upgrade, seemingly because they already
had accumulated read errors over the years.)  I've been emptying and
relabeling those to reset the error count in the tape header, as the count may
be somewhat artificial, and am keeping records to watch for repeat offenders.
So far, so good.  At $50 per tape, normal length, one does not want to toss
tapes for no substantive reason.  After four years and very few problems with
3590s, I'm a big fan of that tape technology.

   Richard Sims, BU