Like Wanda and Bob, we've had our 3494 for coming up on 7 years now.
In that time, though, we've never had a robot failure, nor have we had
to run in manual mode.

We have the dual-gripper option, though, and that's saved us several
times when we've had gripper failures.  For example, the time the
gripper was flinging tapes around inside the library.  The bad gripper
had to be manually disabled since the LM thought it was fine.  But the
second gripper kept us in automated mode.

Another reason for the HA1 option, though, is performance.  If you have
a really large 3494 (pushing 16 frames), dual robots apparently can be
a big boost to mount service times.  Or so says the IBM tape Top Gun
who was here over the weekend helping us expand our 3494.  Fortunately,
our library isn't that big (and I don't expect it to ever get that big).

=Dave

Prather, Wanda wrote:
>
> Ditto.
> Our 3494 is 7 years old now.
> Same experience with failures (1-2 a year).
> Same experience waiting for the plane to arrive with parts!
> We also just put it in manual mode and tough it out until the repairs
> are done.


--
Hello World.                                    David Bronder - Systems Admin
Segmentation Fault                                     ITS-SPA, Univ. of Iowa
Core dumped, disk trashed, quota filled, soda warm.   david-bronder AT uiowa 
DOT edu