8mm, DLT, and LTO-1 generation drives are susceptible to what is called
"shoe-shinning" which can damage the media and/or the drive heads. This
happens when the data isn't feeding fast enough to the drives causing
them to spin over and over on the same part of the media, hence the name
"shoe-shinning". Later generation drives such as LTO-2 have a governor
that will cause the speed of the tape to ramp down on buffer underruns.

The other solution is to make sure you have enough parallelism to keep
the tapes busy or use staging to buffer the data to disk before sending
it to tape.

Matthew Huff           | One Manhattanville Rd
Director of Operations | Purchase, NY 10577
OTA LLC                | Phone: 914-460-4039 
mailto:mhuff AT ox DOT com    | Fax:   914-460-4139  

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Rehan, Savin [mailto:savin.rehan AT HP DOT COM] 
> Sent: Thursday, November 13, 2003 10:36 AM
> To: NETWORKER AT LISTMAIL.TEMPLE DOT EDU
> Subject: [Networker] SDLT tapes and drives
> 
> 
> Hi ,
> 
> We are new to SDLT technology and heard a rumour that if the 
> backup speed is below a certain level then it could damage 
> the tape and/or drive . Is this true ? Does anybody have any 
> useful links on SDLT's
> 
> Savin
> HP
> 
> --
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> 

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