>On Nov 10, 2014, at 10:15 AM, Dan Langille <dan AT langille DOT org> wrote:
>> How often does your LTO-6 tape drive need to be cleaned?
Hi, I bought five cleaning tapes ten years ago. Four are on sale :o)
HP LTO-3: Almost never, 7 years of operation
HP LTO-5: Almost never, 2 years of operation
650 mounts, roughly 1 petabyte written
2 uses of cleaning tape, however I would bet that both were
just my experiments with reading of cartridge memory
Simply buy library, reserve one slot for cleaning tape, insert cleaning
tape into and sing "I don't care! I love it! I don't care!" :o)
You can look into /usr/src/sys/cam/scsi/scsi_sa.c. The timeouts are
in minutes. Even IO has default timeout 4 minutes. Maybe the reason
is possible cleaning?
If you are really interested, please read
http://www.tarconis.com/documentos/LTO_Cleaning_wp.pdf
It is rather old, but many things still have to be true.
It is from HP and it is possible that IBM is different.
But I did not find similar document from IBM.
The most important facts from the document above are:
1) The tape is flying over the head during the operation and the only
contact is just when tape starts or stops. So yes, correct streaming
is very important. Tape drive has to write data without repositions.
2) There is internal non-abrasive brush, which is usually sufficient.
(From 150 km and LTO-1, I think that it may be preventively used
after roughly 5 fully written tapes, but it is just my unconfirmed
estimate.)
3) The cleaning tape is used practically only as a last resort and could
not replace the brush - it is for another type of dirt. And it is
abrasive, so if there is no reason to use cleaning tape, do not do it.
Your head will be happier.
Regards.
--
Rudolf Cejka <cejkar at fit.vutbr.cz> http://www.fit.vutbr.cz/~cejkar
Brno University of Technology, Faculty of Information Technology
Bozetechova 2, 612 66 Brno, Czech Republic
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