--On March 8, 2007 4:57:51 PM -0500 Jon LaBadie <jon AT jgcomp DOT com> wrote:

On Thu, Mar 08, 2007 at 12:35:54PM -0700, Michael Loftis wrote:

New drives are really quiet.  Not to mention some new libraries (like
our  Spectra T50) bury the drives in the middle of the library so you
can't  really hear the mechanism working like you can older libraries
with louder  drives.  Desktop units you can still pretty readily listen
to and tell when  they're shoe-shining, but as far as libraries go, does
anyone do anything  other than just do their best to listen?  That's
what I've done  for...well...ever but I'm beginning to wonder if there's
a better way.

Does your drive have an activity light.  When I first put in my LTO-1,
the card was really old and gave low rates.  A newer card more than
doubled it.  Another difference was the activity light.  It is on
nearly solid now, it was on/off/on/off on the old slower scsi card.