On Dec 13, 2005, at 11:31 AM, Dennis Melburn W IT743 wrote:

Our sites use ADIC Scalar 1Ks as well as one ADIC 10K.  The Scalar 1Ks
have  4 LTO1 drives in each and the 10K has 34 LTO2 drives.  We
experience occasional failures on these drives and have to replace
them.
My question is, is it normal for a site that has alot of drives to
experience drive failures about every 1-1.5 months?  My manager is
rather annoyed at the fact that it seems that we are constantly
replacing drives even though it doesn't cause any downtime for our TSM
servers while they are being replaced.  If this is a normal part of
having tape libraries then that is fine, but I don't have enough
experience in this field to say either way, so that is why I am asking
all of you.

Customers with 359x drives (which are never replaced) would certainly
find that replacement frequency alarming; and from any perspective,
that's rather extreme. Your site may have periodic management-level
review meetings with the vendor, where a good explanation should be
required of the vendor. Your management might then specify that if a
resolution to the problem is not forthcoming, then they might abandon
that vendor for another. (A complication there is that ADIC has been
the OEM for some name-brand drive resellers.) Make sure they review
external factors for cause, such as bad power feeding the drives,
excessive contaminants in the local atmosphere, tapes coming back
from offsite after rough handling, etc.

In any site where drive replacement occurs with any frequency, I
would advise chronicling the serial numbers of all such drives. You
would like to believe that you are getting new drives as
replacements, where the serial number should be nearby or higher than
that being replaced - and that you don't find the same drive coming
back sometime later.

   Richard Sims