Jim,

My experience is with 3575 libraries and 3570 drives.  When you say you get "two
or three a day" do you mean per drive?  Or overall?

Our system sees any given drive clean itself 1-2 times per month.  We have nine
3570 drives so we expect to see 9-18 cleaning events per month on our entire
system.  Unless you're working the heck out of your drives, I would imagine that
you should see similar cleaning frequencies.  If a particular drive is cleaning
itself very often, there is something wrong with the drive. Period.  Over the
last three years we've had instances of defective drive microcode, worn drive
heads, and defective drive analog cards.  Each of those problems manifested
itself by a cleaning frequency of 2-4 times per day on the affected drive.

Good luck.

Tab Trepagnier
Laitram Corporation







Jim Sporer <james.sporer AT DOIT.WISC DOT EDU> on 12/11/2000 11:40:04 AM

Please respond to "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU>

To:   ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
cc:    (bcc: Tab Trepagnier/Corporation/Laitram/US)
Subject:  Re: tape drive needs cleaning




I'm surprised you don't get more of these errors.  We get at least two or
three a day.  Our service people tell us it is normal.
Jim Sporer

At 09:22 AM 12/11/2000 -0800, you wrote:
>We have an ibm h70 running aix 4.3.3 and TSM 3.7.3. It s hooked up to an ibm
>3494 with two magstar 3590 drives. A month ago we saw some tape drive needs
>cleaning messages in the aix error report. They repeated today..
>
>IDENTIFIER TIMESTAMP  T C RESOURCE_NAME  DESCRIPTION
>E507DCF9   1210101500 I H rmt1           TAPE DRIVE NEEDS CLEANING
>D1A1AE6F   1210101500 I H rmt1           TAPE SIM/MIM RECORD
>
>I m wondering if this is normal? To my knowledge the 3494 should be cleaning
>itself as it does have cleaning tapes and is all configured to do so
>automatically.
>
>Gerald Wichmann
>Systems Engineer
>Sansia System Solutions
>408-844-8893 work
>408-884-9801 fax