We have two SL3000s (one all LTO4 and one all LTO5) and have had some
issues with the older one, but none with the newer one. After talking
with a Sun (or was it Oracle?) engineer, it appeared that there were
some firmware bugs with the HP LTO4 drives that caused them to be overly
sensitive to media errors. Apparently, however, the engineer had found
many more mechanical flaws with the IBM drives than with the HP drives.

I can report that after 6 months of pushing our LTO5 SL3000 hard (15+
TB/day), we've had no problems of any kind. We've got HP LTO5 drives in
there, and they've been perfect so far.

On 04/05/2011 03:10 PM, Dury, John C. wrote:
> We purchased an STK SL500 tape library with 4 LTO4 drives in it a few years 
> ago and we have had nothing but problems with it, almost from the beginning. 
> It is fully loaded with LTO4 cartridges (about 160) and seems to randomly 
> just crash and take all of the drives offline to TSM. We also have a second 
> SL500 that is at a remote site and connected to the same TSM server , and it 
> has no problems at all. The remote SL500 has copies (backup stg pool) of the 
> local SL500. We've gone round and round with STK/Oracle support and they have 
> actually come onsite and physically replaced the entire robot and all of it's 
> parts, several times and they can never find a reason as to what is causing 
> it to go offline. Keep in mind this has been happening about once a month or 
> so for over a year.
>
> My questions to all of you is not so much what could be wrong (although if 
> you have ideas, that would be great also), but, we are considering a new 
> robot and are hoping to be able to use or reuse our existing LTO4 tapes. 
> Right now it has about 80 scratches so if we were to goto a second library, I 
> should be able to have both defined to TSM and move the data from one to the 
> other after putting some of the scratches in the new library and 
> labeling/initializing them until all data is in the new library and then I 
> can light the old one on fire (j/k) !
> Like most IT departments we are severely budget constrained so we would like 
> to reuse the tape drives and the tape cartridges and only purchase a robot 
> that can handle 160 slots or so. Suggestions if this is even an option or 
> which robots and/or models to look at? Remember, very little budget for this 
> if I could even get it approved at all but we really don't know what else to 
> do with the bad SL500 at this point and we have a project coming up that is 
> going to increase the amount and flow of data to our TSM system significantly 
> within the new few years.
> Help!
> John

--
-- Skylar Thompson (skylar2 AT u.washington DOT edu)
-- Genome Sciences Department, System Administrator
-- Foege Building S048, (206)-685-7354
-- University of Washington School of Medicine