Shawn,

        not too long ago we had a situation where multiple tapes were failing in
        reading and writing, at first we suspected the drives so we let a
        technician come over, he checked the drives but could not find anything
        wrong with them. The problems with the tapes held on, even worse, more
        tapes started to fail operations. Before TSM operations would be totally
        disrupted we ended up ditching about 15 failing DLT tapes, this is after
        more than a years worth of "heavy duty" use (collacated tapes and
        in-library copy volumes).

        The problem tapes were replaced and till date (4 months later) no
        tape errors.


        regards Walter Ridderhof.

______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: Re: Expiring Media Tapes
Author:  "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU> at INET-1
Date:    12/6/00 6:56 AM


I had a similar problem a while back on our ATL P3000.  They ended up
replacing the drives because of a defect at the time in manufacturing. This
was on robots purchased around Sept/Oct of 1999. It was to do with pins
inside of the drives.

Often times, I hear "you have bad tapes" - if I were you, I wouldn't fall
for that.  Have them send someone else out to look at it. As many times I
was told the same, but then when different eyes looked, they found problems.

For instance, one time, one of the fans were bad, but it was not indicating
it. This too led to some problems. Another time, it was one of the power
supplies was faulty and not always reporting a problem.  In other words, ask
that they send another tech out.

In the two years of having two ATL robots, we had 1 tape go bad and that was
due to a drive that had went bad and killed the tape.