Veritas-bu

[Veritas-bu] RE: Number of mounts before getting rid of a tape?

2005-11-01 14:49:18
Subject: [Veritas-bu] RE: Number of mounts before getting rid of a tape?
From: MarkP AT spectralogic DOT com (Mark Pinder)
Date: Tue, 1 Nov 2005 12:49:18 -0700
Tape life is measured differently for different Drive/media vendors. Most of 
them have Numbers that appear to be inordinately high based on actual failure 
rates. 

Sony says that AIT tapes are good for 10,000 loads and/or 30,000 end to end 
passes. I've never seen one actually last this long, but I've also never seen 
them used this much either. 

LTO-2/3 media also has an anticipated life of several thousand loads and many 
more end to end passes. 

As a HW vendor for this stuff, I have to say that I personally think these are 
simply Marketing numbers invented through ideal testing (Like MPG for cars) and 
I would not trust them.

At the same time, we have customers who have been using the same media for over 
3 years without ill effect. 

The best advice I can give you about it is to use it until it fails, but 
anticipate that failure and have some amount of new media (~5%) brought in 
every quarter or so. This will give you a surplus stock to replace tapes that 
die and give you the opportunity to remove some of the most used tapes. These 
can be "filed" somewhere and used in case of emergency. 

I hope this helps.


Mark Pinder 
Systems Engineer
Spectra Logic 
www.spectralogic.com




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