[BBLISA] tapes getting old?

[Matt Finnigan]

Edward,
This sounds to me like the drive is bad. Have you cleaned it? Done any of
the manufacturer diagnostics on it?

On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 10:47 PM, Edward Ned Harvey <bblisa4 at nedharvey.com>wrote:

> 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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