IIRC, LTO cartridges are rated in the hundreds of thousands of passes and
tens of thousands of mounts (you need multiple passes to fill a volume,
depending on the LTO generation).

This means in practice you will never hit the "rated" maximum of the
cartridge. Instead, you will hit problems caused by manufacturing defects
or your particular environment (temperature, humidity, shock, etc.), so you
should be looking for library and I/O errors on a particular cartridge to
decide when to retire it.

On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 02:50:34PM +0000, Lamb, Charles P. wrote:
> Hi...............
>
> Does anyone have recommendations on how long an IBM LTO4 tape should be used 
> and the maximum number of tape mounts on an IBM LTO4 tape??

--
-- Skylar Thompson (skylar2 AT u.washington DOT edu)
-- Genome Sciences Department, System Administrator
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-- University of Washington School of Medicine