Our experience has been with 9840 (A's) and LTO gen 1 drives.  The 9840s have
been rock solid for years, while the LTO has had more failures in the past
14 months
or so than all of our STK drives over the past 8 or so years.

The LTOs started off rough, but I must admit that lately things have
stabalized, though
we still have some oddities occur (may be SAN backup related).  I wouldn't
be concerned
with the proprietary drives from STK.

Our libraries are a STK 4410, STK 9310 (11,000 slots total) and a IBM 3584
single frame.
No problems with the robotics in any of them.

leonard

At 01:09 PM 9/30/2003 +0100, you wrote:

Hello

Anybody out there able to share their thoughts and experiences?

We're doing a technology refresh on some of our libraries and have a number
of products in the frame:
IBM 3584 / LTO-2
ADIC Scalar i2000 / LTO-2
HP ESL9322 / LTO-2
StorageTek L700e / T9940B

The interesting one from my point of view is the L700e with its T9940B
drives. The performance/capacity comparisons between LTO-2 and T9940B seem
close enough to make no difference which leaves cost and reliability as the
differentiators.

Reliability will be an important factor in our decision and the T9940B
seems to be marketed as a high duty cycle, 24 x 7 drive. Does anybody have
any real world experieces in a TSM environment which suggest the T9940B is
more (or less) reliable than LTO-2? Should I be concerned about going for a
'proprietary' technology like 9x40 instead of an 'open' standard like LTO?

Also, any thoughts on the libraries we are considering would be gratefully
appreciated.