On 2014-11-10 07:32 AM, John Drescher wrote:
>> How often does your LTO-6 tape drive need to be cleaned?
>>
>> I ask because a recent post mentioned every 10 tapes.  With my limited tape 
>> knowledge, that seems rather high, but I have no LTO experience.
>
> That seems excessive to me although I am still using a dual drive LTO2
> autoloader. For that I run a cleaning cycle 2 times per year for each
> of the HP LTO2 tape drives.
>
> John
>

I have an IBM LTO-3 autoloader here.  I just have a cleaning cartridge 
in the reserved slot in the library and I let it take care of itself 
rather than trying to do it on any sort of schedule.  It loads the 
cleaning cartridge a couple of times a year.  I bought this library used 
- when I first started using it I had to run cleanings every few weeks 
but they tapered off quite significantly after it had been in use for a 
while.

The research I've done in the past on LTO technology has implied that 
you should never need to trigger a cleaning cycle on your own - the 
drive will let you know if it needs it.  Cleaning tapes should only be 
used when the drive requests one.  Our bigger library we had in the 
office ran for years without ever requesting a cleaning.

It's worth mentioning that different manufacturers have different 
cleaning programs in their drives.  For instance my IBM drive runs a 
much shorter cleaning cycle and has about 3-4x more cycles 'allowed' on 
a cleaning tape versus my HP drive I was using before it.  My experience 
with my limited sample size of a half dozen LTO drives would seem to 
indicate that the IBM drive requests cleaning more often too.

Also worth mentioning - the way your drive is used will have a 
significant impact on how many cleaning cycles it needs.  If you aren't 
flowing data fast enough to it to keep it streaming at full speed it 
will build up a lot of cruft on the heads much faster. Bacula can help 
with this greatly by spooling data before writing, in particular with 
incremental backups that have many small files scattered all over the disk.

Bryn

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