You know there is a lot of discussion on cleaning tapes and their uses...and
I'm sure this will spark a long thread on the "To use or Not to use the
Cleaning Tape Frequency" subject.
Here's the news I received from a reliable source about how the cleaning
tapes and DLT tape drives function.
The basics are as such, the drive should only be "cleaned" when the drive
indicates the requirement via the drive cleaning light. The fucntion of the
cleaning tape along with some minor 'cleaning' really is to re-calibrate the
amplitude of the drive heads. When the cleaning light appears on the drive
it is because the internal amplitude measurement has exceeded the norm. The
cleaning tape has certain properties that allow the tape drive to
re-calibrate itself to operate within the acceptable range. When this is
done the light on the drive goes off. If this fails to re-calibrate, then
the clean drive light stays on. If the light remains on after multiple
attempts to "clean" the drive, this may indicate a hardware problem.
So, while I believe its important to "clean" the drives, I don't think it
necessary to do it more often than the drive's requirement.
As far as you tapes getting stuck in the drive...well there aren't too many
options there. Unfortunately you have to get access to that drive to free
the stuck tape and that would require the robot to be offline.
-----Original Message-----
From: veritas-bu-admin AT Eng.Auburn DOT EDU
[mailto:veritas-bu-admin AT Eng.Auburn DOT EDU]On Behalf Of Lawrence, Bob
Sent: Friday, January 26, 2001 11:36 AM
To: veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: [Veritas-bu] Stuck Cleaning Tapes
NBU 3.1.5 on NT4
STK9714 with 6 DLT7000
Master with 3 DLT7000 and robot arm
3 slaves, each with 1 drive in the STK9714
I have 2 problems:
1. My cleaning tapes are getting stuck far more than usual, this seems to
be when they use their last clean (20).
Anyone experienced this?
I have autocleaning on for every 25hrs of drive usage, I was advised to use
this figure, but I'm thinking it's too much.
I've disabled autocleaning for now and chucked this batch of Maxell
cleaners.
2. When a tape gets stuck, the drive goes down, so my Operators try and
remove the stuck tape manually while other backups are running to the other
drives/slaves. Last night I had multiple stuck tapes and drives down, can
this be caused by the robot door being open so the robot is "offline"?
(Door was open for quite a long time - during which another drive might have
needed a tape swap)
If this is the case, how can you remove a stuck tape when other drives are
in use?
thanks
Bob
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