[BBLISA] tapes getting old?

[Edward Ned Harvey]

I have an LTO3 tape autoloader.  It's been in production for about 3-4
years, but it's never been reliable.  For the last 9 months or so, it's been
so unreliable I've barely used it at all, but now I'm working hard to bring
it back to life.

 

Right now, I have a very repeatable behavior:  I can write all the data I
want to all the tapes I want, as long as I only write zero's.  But when I
write any real data (containing a mixture of 1's in it) then I can only
write a small amount of data (1M or 100M or so) it varies...  And it exits
with IO error.

 

Tapes have been in rotation.  Meaning we don't just write once and archive
permanently.  We write them, take them offsite, and some time later they
will eventually rotate back in to be written again.  I don't know how many
times each tape has been written ... I would guess 5 times each roughly.

 

I wonder, maybe the failure mode for LTO3 tapes is that they start becoming
unwritable when they're old?  Or unwritable when they've been written more
than X times?

 

Any ideas?  I tried googling, but didn't find anything relevant.

 

Thanks...

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