I can't speak for AIT-2, but I have 2 46120's with AIT-1 drives.

Now, my libraries are 4+ years old (upgraded once from exabyte to
ait1), but they do not have any ability to auto-clean drives.  You
need your bkup program to control this.

As far as self cleaning, I found that if I didn't clean the drives I
would eventually get hdwr drive errors in the AIX error log.  The
drive did NOT indicate it needed cleaning (some flashing light
pattern on the drive).  The drive thought everything was ok, but aix
was getting hdwr errors from it.  Running a cleaning tape in the
drive always fixed this problem.  I now clean the drives about once a
month.

You can really tell how dirty the drives are by the length of time
the cleaning cartridge stays in the drive.  I just cleaned my drives
today - it probably didn't take 30 seconds to clean a drive.  When
the hdwr errors occur (described above), it could take a couple
minutes to clean a drive.  If it does take this long to clean a
drive, I run the drive through another cleaning (or more) until the
drive completes a cleaning cycle in a short period.

NOTE:  ait-2 might be different!!!!!

Rick


On 29 Sep 2000, at 9:01, Dean Winger wrote:

> Can anyone help with this?
> I have a Qualstar 46120 tape library outfitted with four AIT-2 drives.  I 
> would like to set up a schedule for cleaning the drives.  Any recommendations 
> on how I should do this?  I am using TSM 4.1.1 for Windows NT.
>
> I do not think that this library has the built in capability of automating 
> this process via a hardware solution.  I see that there is a cleaning 
> frequency parameter with options for Gigabytes/ASNEEDED/None.  Is this what I 
> should be using?  If so how should I set it for this library with AIT-2
drives?
>
> Just a side note:  I thought the press releases for AIT-2 technology stated 
> that these drives are self-cleaning.  If this is true, why does Sony make 
> cleaning tapes?
>
> Thanks for your help