Hello fellow 9840 drive users,

        We are currently utilizing NetBackup (v3.2) to clean our 9840 tape
drives (in a 9740 StorageTek robotic Tape Library) via the frequency
setting. We are currently initiating a drive clean request after every 8
hours of drive activity. This seems extremely frequent given accounts of DLT
drives only being cleaned after 60 hours of use, but if I start pushing the
frequency much past 8 hours we start getting media errors(status 84); of
course, we still do occassionaly get media errors even with the 8 hour
setting.  I realize of course that factors such as how clean your tape
library's environment is( I would consider ours to be clean) and how many
new tapes(more oxide being stripped off) you are utilizing for backups can
impact the number of errors that you get. 

        What are you doing regarding cleaning the 9840 drives? Are you
utilizing the hardware to initiate cleans (we tried this when we first got
setup with NetBackup, but had a larger than anticipated  number of media
errors and switched to the frequency setting), or are you using the
NetBackup software to initiate the cleaning? If you're using the software,
what sort of frequency settings are you using?   I've tried to get our
"solutions provider" to get me some cleaning frequency stats on the 9840
drives, but they weren't able to get anything. 

Thanks everyone. 
Grant
Transport Canada