A side note...

     Inside the 3590 drive there is this real neat little tape scraper...
     small brass piece with what seems to be two carbide blades to clean
     foreign matter off the tape as it passes in either direction across
     it.

     Anyway, in extreme high use environments it has been noticed that
     "gunk" will build up on the scraper blades and then sluff off, back
     onto the tape, which I would imagine triggers the type of temporary
     error that probably requests a drive cleaning...

     I believe there was some form of technical news letter sent out to the
     service engineers that mentions this and when it would be more
     beneficial to "remove" the scrapers.

     Now don't worry about the gunk that used to be scraped off by the
     little doodads now being caught on the read/write head 'cause the
     read/write head has a little internal brush that gives it a swipe
     between mounts.  (now if they would only position a small air nozzle
     to blow off the brush we would have complete over kill)

     anyway, just a FYI

     Oh, we've had them removed from some of our environments and misc.
     errors associated with suggested action of "clean drive" has greatly
     been reduced. (well, errors period)

     later,
           Dwight


______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: Re: Excessive 3590 drive cleaning?
Author:  abeid.ahh.habsy (abeid.ahh.habsy AT PDO.CO DOT OM) at unix,mime
Date:    6/2/99 11:33 PM


John

We have 3590s in 3494 Library, we have scheduled tape cleaning after
every 100 tape mounts. We still receive the tape cleaning requests.
Even if we lower the number of mounts or schedule by day. I know our
tape drives are clean!!!!

Regards,
Abeid Al-Habsy, TCS/11
PDO, Oman.