RE: Creating 3480 tapes on a 3490E tape drive?

>We use have a 3490E tape drive, and we can Create/Write & Read to 3480
>media.
>
>As far as I am aware we do not have any special PTF's loaded on the As/400.

The only issue is when you need to initialize and write in *FMT3480 mode;
reading a tape initialized/written as *FMT3480 is not a problem.  Writing
to a 3480 cartridge is not a problem either-you can write to them in
*FMT3490E density without any special changes.

You can use 3480 media in a 3490E drive (any model, even without the ptfs
and microcode) - if you initialize them as *FMT3490E.  If you don't need to
store a lot of data (ie, distribution media-which is what we do with them),
it's cheaper than using 3490e (two tone) cartridges.

If you use a 3480 cartridge in a 3490e drive and it is not set up as an F
model with the requisite PTFs for releases prior to V4R3, and appropriate
microcode levels in the tape drive as I described, it will *not* format the
tape as *FMT3480, it will send back a message (check your joblog!) that it
was initialized as *FMT3490e.  Even if you specified *FMT3480.  If you
think I'm mistaken, try it, then do a DSPTAP. 

-Ilena Ayala




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