On Wed, 2 Jun 1999 15:54:20 -0500, John Valdes asked:

>I'm seeing what looks like excessive drive cleaning on our 3590 tape drives.

Yes, the drive will signal the need to be cleaned based on the number of
temporary errors recorded.  If you are seeing this on only some drives,
report it to the CE and continue to report it until it is fixed.
We have had problems with bad heads, etc.  The main problems have
resulted in preventive maintenance on all our drives.  There is a head
cleaning brush that gets worn down over time and needs to be replaced.
There was also a recent engineering change to remove Head Cleaner Blades
that were supposed to scrape dirt off the tape was it went by, but
caused more problems than it solved.

>(The firmware in our drives is level 95FB (according to
>'lscfg -v'), although I notice now that one of them is at level 957D.)

I doubt it is bad microcode, but it can't hurt to upgrade.  The latest
microcode we have is A2FC which introduced new function to monitor
errors on each tape and report if there are excessive errors.  It has
told us to replace 10% of our older tapes.  This function (SARS) must be
enabled after the mocrocode is upgraded.

    Mike Knight       This is my personal opinion, not any company's, etc.