RE: 5010 tape drive question..

[Neil Palmer <NeilP@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Well, Mike's right about new cartridges shedding excess/loose oxide the 
first few passes, and therefore in theory you may need to clean the 
tape drive a bit more often the first few times you use new tapes - BUT 
- the 'clean me' light on some drives (and the QIC-5010 (6385/6345) is 
one of them) is turned on strictly based on the number of hours of 
usage of the drive, regardless of how dirty the head is or isn't.  When 
the QIC-5010 was originally released I believe the # of hours between 
cleanings was set to 40.  IBM noticed a few more read/write errors than 
they cared for and later microcode PTF's for the QIC-5010 changed the 
time between cleanings to 8 hours.  I think that may be going from one 
extreme to another, and maybe they should have chopped it to around 20 
hours, but it sure helps with sales of cleaning tapes    :-)



Neil Palmer         DPS Data Processing Services Canada Ltd.
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Thornhill, Ontario,  Canada    ___________          ___  ~
Phone: (905) 731-9000  x238   |OOOOOOOOOO| ________  o|__||=
Cell.: (416) 565-1682  x238   |__________|_|______|_|______)
Fax:   (905) 731-9202          oo      oo   oo  oo   OOOo=o\
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-----Original Message-----
From:   Mike Shaw [SMTP:mshaw@ncal.verio.com]
Sent:   Tuesday, October 20, 1998 4:26 PM
To:     MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com
Subject:        Re: 5010 tape drive question..
Importance:     High

Don,

I have seen this with 3590's as well....CE explained it as new 
cartridges
leaving a lot of residue and the end result being that cleanings are 
more
frequent as a result initially....Does make sense if you look at it in 
terms
of initializing the cartridges plus any save/restore activity...In our 
case,
it did get back to a more normal cleaning cycle once we got through the
initialization process.

If you are still uncomfortable, check the error log and the volume 
stats via
SST...If there are no perm or temp errors being logged, attribute it to 
the
new cartridges and just keep an eye on it.  It should decrease.

HTH,

Mike Shaw
-----Original Message-----
From: Don <dr2@access.digex.net>
To: midrange-l@midrange.com <midrange-l@midrange.com>
Date: Monday, October 19, 1998 10:41 AM
Subject: 5010 tape drive question..


>
>
>Greetings,
>
>we've got a client with a 5010 tape drive and I'm getting ALOT of the
>"clean the tape drive" light coming on.  This is a new drive and new
>tapes.  Is there a known problem here or am I the only one having this
>scenerio??
>
>Don in DC


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