On Jan 29, 2009, at 10:06 PM, Skylar Thompson wrote:

Richard Sims wrote:

Put problem tapes through tapeutil or similar exercising to get them
worked in, and evaluated.  New tapes can be surprisingly troublesome:
I've had a bunch of problems with new IBM 3592 tapes.  Frustrating
waste of customer time.

  Richard Sims

Do you offline one of your TSM drives to do that, or do you have a
dedicated drive? My back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that we'd
be
spending about 10 drive-days a month breaking in new tapes. In light
of
our recent fiasco, that might be worth it though. What would be really
nice would be TSM doing this on its own. Maybe in TSM 6.2? ;)

I would only engage in such work for tapes which seemed problematic,
taking a drive away from TSM for a while to do that.  A new tape may
exhibit a write error or two in initial uses, and then be okay in the
future, as regular usage seems to smooth out the coating and knock off
any microscopic irregularities.  "Experienced" cartridges seem to be
happier cartridges.  Our life with tape.

  Richard Sims