On Thursday 08 March 2007, Michael Loftis wrote:
>--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.
>
>Buried in the library.  Can't view the drives at all with any of the
>Spectra libraries.  The T50 if you open it, and remove a storage
> cartridge you can kinda see the drives but they're pretty obscured by
> the loader mechanism.

That seems to me like it ought to be something you could bitch at the 
vendor about, nibbling on them like a duck till they issue a fix.  Heck, 
that to me is just a basic troubleshooting & tuning tool.  To leave that 
out was a very questionable action considering the cost of a library.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Operator, please trace this call and tell me where I am.