I had a 3584 with 10 LTO1 drives for 3 years; in that time, I think we
replaced two drives. We replaced the library (lease expired) with a new
3584 with 10 LTO2 drives over a year ago; we've had one drive flake out
and replaced it about a month ago. IIRC, all the LTO1 swaps were in the
first six months.

I run about 2.2 TB of backup/archive nightly, and copy about 1.9 TB of
that for off-site.

I'd check the microcode/firmware on the drives and libraries; I didn't
have that kind of failure rate with the DLT-7000 drives, even.

Tom Kauffman
NIBCO, Inc

-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
Dennis Melburn W IT743
Sent: Tuesday, December 13, 2005 11:31 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Normal # of failures on tape libraries

Our sites use ADIC Scalar 1Ks as well as one ADIC 10K.  The Scalar 1Ks
have  4 LTO1 drives in each and the 10K has 34 LTO2 drives.  We
experience occasional failures on these drives and have to replace them.
My question is, is it normal for a site that has alot of drives to
experience drive failures about every 1-1.5 months?  My manager is
rather annoyed at the fact that it seems that we are constantly
replacing drives even though it doesn't cause any downtime for our TSM
servers while they are being replaced.  If this is a normal part of
having tape libraries then that is fine, but I don't have enough
experience in this field to say either way, so that is why I am asking
all of you.
 
 
Mel Dennis