I'll 2nd that on the cleaner blocks.  We had many problems with media
errors until we *made* the CE remove the blocks.  He shook his head and
said "Alright, it's your system"......Media errors just about vanished.

In 6 years of 3494 with 3490e and 3590 drives, I have only had 5 that were
destoryed by the drives.   Now if you want to count the number tapes
destroyed by operators....well, that's a different story!

Al Barth




"Cook, Dwight E" <DWIGHT.E.COOK AT SAIC DOT COM>
Sent by: "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU>
11/21/02 06:05 AM
Please respond to "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager"


        To:     ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
        cc:
        Subject:        Re: 3590 Tape Drives


Make sure IBM has removed the cleaner blocks from the drives.
If tapes are being eaten, I'd say it is probably poorly adjusted pressures
in the drive somewhere or something isn't in proper alignment BUT I'm NOT
an
IBM technician so I really shouldn't say...
In 7 years across 7 ATL's with 7 year old tapes (for the most part) we are
still going strong !
In all we've only lost somewhere between 10-15 tapes to total destruction
(so 1-2 a year out of some 15,000)


Dwight



-----Original Message-----
From: Martina Sawatzki [mailto:msa AT OERAG DOT DE]
Sent: Thursday, November 21, 2002 5:30 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: 3590 Tape Drives


We have all four drives chewing up tapes on  regular intervals. To make a
rough estimate I would say that this happens  once or sometimes twice  a
month and all drives are effected in the same way. I have no idea if this
is the normal wear  due to lots of mounts.
We always check out the tape which caused the problem and in most cases we
have a technician change parts of the drive or even the whole drive.
The age of our tapes is different. We exchanged a lot of them to new ones,
but also still  have  tapes which are 3, maybe 4 years old.