Peter,

I have a 3583 rather than a 3584, but over the last 1-1/4 years it's been
in service, the only time we've had a tape failure was when we had a
hardware failure - dead picker (four times), jammed drives (twice), etc.
We have 71 data tapes in our library and we've never seen one just fail.

Our system is running on AIX but in this case that shouldn't make any
difference.

Could you have electrical interference or SCSI termination problems?  On
my 3583 and DLT libraries I finally cabled them so that drive data does
not flow through the library controllers - the controller is the last
"real" device on the SCSI chain.  That made a world of difference in
reliability.

Good luck.

Tab Trepagnier
TSM Administrator
Laitram LLC







Peter Ford <PFord AT STENTOR DOT COM>
Sent by: "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU>
01/08/2003 04:50 PM
Please respond to "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager"


        To:     ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
        cc:
        Subject:        faulty media


Recently, we have been experiencing a high number of media errors
(generally read errors with some locate errors) on our 3584 LTO library. A
recent query of the volumes table shows that we have 37 tapes (out of 250)
with read errors!  We have had IBM out to inspect the library and drives,
and they report that everything is fine.  Is it normal to have this many
errors?  Could we have that many bad tapes?  The tapes are not rewritten
very often (the data being stored is for a long term and is generally very
static).  Has anyone else experienced these kind of media issues?

We are running TSM 4.2.2.13 on Win2K, the library is connected via LVD
SCSI, and all the firmware on the drives are up-to-date.

Thanks in advance.
Peter

    Peter Ford
    System Engineer


Stentor, Inc.
 5000 Marina Blvd,
 Brisbane, CA 94005-1811
 Main Phone: 650-228-5555
 Fax: 650 228-5566
 http://www.stentor.com
 pford AT stentor DOT com