On 03/04/11 21:50, Edward Ned Harvey 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.
I agree with Kent and Andrew, seems like a hardware issue to me. I have been using LTO-3 tapes for a long while now, overwriting as well. Some of the tapes have been in rotation as long as the drive has (~4 years). We started getting some odd issues a while back with writer errors, we replaced the tape, still got the same errors. When we ran the HP diagnostics, it reported an issue with the cable (external caddy). Turns out it'd been pinched in one of the cable management arms (+1 to the folks that don't like those things). Another odd issue we had when we first started using it was the drive didn't like sharing a SCSI controller, we had to put in an additional card. See if the manufacturer of your drive has diagnostic utilities, grab a blank tape, and let it run. -- Jonathan Angliss _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
