Thanks Rainer and everyone else who responded to my query.

We had all our AIT-2 drives upgraded to firmware level 0204 last Thursday.
We had been runnning level 0107 on the worst affected drives and 0108 on
the other drive.

Since then we have not seen any further I/O errors - so hopefully this
has done the trick. Performance in stop/start mode is still of some concern
but at least the drive doesn't hang completely.

>On Fri, 25 Jun 2004, Steven Bridge wrote:
>
> > Currently running TSM server version 5.1.8 on an AIX 5.2 machine.
> > We have a Qualstar TLS-412600 library with three AIT-2 drives.
> > [...]
> >
> > I would be interested to hear if anyone else has experienced the
> > same problems with these drives - assuming anyone else uses AIT drives.
>
>Yes, with a Qualstar TLS-4210 with two AIT-2 drives. The errors went away
>after a firmware upgrade of the drives (revision 0107 --> 010f, according
>to the service protocol).  Since then, no problems.
>
>The firmware revision is now 0204.
>
> > I wonder whether the problem is symptomatic with these drives or
> > whether there are any firmware upgrades that might fix the problem.
> > How do you find out what version is on the drive ?
>
>Any tool that executes a SCSI inquiry command should do. I'm sure there i=
>s
>something on AIX :-)

'lscfg -vl rmt0' is the most likely candidate in AIX but only shows the
Manufacturer and Machine Type and Model fields for the AIT drives.
So had to rely on the engineer's Windows based tools when he performed
the upgrade.

+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
 Steven Bridge     Systems Group, Information Systems, EISD
                          University College London