Re: Temporary tape errors

Late to the thread but I just looked at a POWER5-520 with internal LTO2 that's about ready to retire (Idling now) and it shows lifetime 47,000,000 write errors. It's been in service a long time and I know the drive has been replaced so the errors may be from a failing drive here that were never cleared out.

The Power7 that replaced it has internal LTO5 tape and over 1 month shows *zero write errors.

Another customer's Power6 with internal LTO4 in service for three years shows *zero write errors as well.

Maybe those LTO2 drives in Power5 were error prone?

- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

www.frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com
www.iInTheCloud.com

On 3/4/2014 8:51 AM, Jeff Crosby wrote:

I heard from my HW service provider this morning. They want to replace the
internal 5755 drive, a 'cage', and wiring harness I think that's it, but
he may have said something else. I asked whether the replacement drive was
tested and would eliminate the Temporary Tape Errors ("TTE" for short).
They said it was tested, but no, the TTEs would not be eliminated.

I asked why should I change drives and still have TTEs? They said this
drive would have fewer errors. They have 15 systems in their data center
and every internal tape drive has TTEs. Customers with internal tape
drives also have TTEs. Systems with external tape drives (data center and
customers) don't have TTEs. Per them, TTEs on internal tape drives is the
norm.

This *really* bothers me to think that it's acceptable in the midrange
world to have TTEs on internal tape drives. I'm really interested in
whether anyone on this list that is using internal tape drive for backup
would check their *VOLSTATS via the PRTERRLOG command and report.

I have yet to give them the OK to do this. When I do, I may say that I
want to do it Friday at 5pm so if there is a catastrophic issue we have the
weekend to recover. (The last time they replaced the internal tape drive
we lost a hard drive upon restart.) Maybe I'm overreacting, but I am
amazed at how much my confidence in the HW has been shaken over the past
couple of months.








On Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 6:43 PM, Steinmetz, Paul <PSteinmetz@xxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

Jeff,

I checked both LPARs, 3 temporary write errors total, lifetime stats, (2
years).
Power7 8205-E6C with TS3200 LTO5 4 HH Fiber attached drives.

Years back I remember more temp errors, I can't remember if it was 3590,
8MM, or LTO3.
I also remember media errors, haven't seen one of those since on LTO5, LT
5 back on LTO3, many more on 3590 and 8mm.
I remember many saves erroring or hanging because of tape errors, 3590
and 8mm days.

Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:
midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Roberto José Etcheverry
Romero
Sent: Friday, February 28, 2014 6:08 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: Temporary tape errors

may it have anything to do with sharing the scsi controller between the
disks and the tape? i know FC has problems with that (and in fact i'm
almost sure that the ts3200 that keeps going offline in my bkp server is
due to that)...


On Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 4:51 PM, Buck Calabro <kc2hiz@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 2/28/2014 2:14 PM, Jeff Crosby wrote:

A Save21 for them generated over 9,000 temporary tape write errors.
This compares to 6,160 temporary write errors we got Wednesday
morning and
42,051 temporary write errors we got yesterday (Thursday) morning.

-snip-

What's everybody else's experience before/after a large save?

If I had as few as dozens of errors on a new tape I'd have a CE
looking at the drive.

On the 52 tapes that I have in regular rotation, I have zero temporary
read errors and zero temporary write errors. The TS2900 drive is
about
18 months old; the LTO3 tapes are about 6 years old. We save
600-700GB each night on these tapes.

There are another 20 or so tapes which get rotated in on a less
regular basis. They too are free of temporary read and write errors.
These tapes are even older than the regulars.

Power 720, IBM i 7.1 TL13298.
TS-2900 3572-S4H auto-configured as 3580-004.
--buck

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