Backup Central

We have replaced 7 of 12 drives, with 2 more generating excessive cleaning requests. I expect them to be replaced within a few days.

The good news is that we rotate our tapes, so we are starting to re-use old tapes and should see this behavior stop. The bad news is that I have been assured that the tapes I am using are the "new and improved" reformulated tapes that should not be causing excessive head wear.

We have sent the last few drives to IBM for failure analysis, results expected in a few weeks.

@Anonymouse

Since the 'quote' and 'code' tags have been removed (the reason is completely invalid *sigh* -- they should really just remove the whole email-reply function for a large number of reasons, but that's for another topic)...therefore, from your prior message:

>>The bad news is that I have been assured that the tapes I am using are the "new and improved" reformulated tapes that should not be causing excessive head wear.

I'd question the accuracy of the source of your information based on the troubles that you're seeing.

If you don't mind, or want to share, take a picture of the bottom of one of your LTO-5 tapes. I'll compare it with a bunch that I have in my possession that I know, for a fact, that are based on the new formula.

Just a quick update. I use HP LTO 5 drives and LTFS. We have only used Fuji and HP tapes. As we use the tapes for a video archive each tape is used once to write and occasionally for restores.

All my drive have gone bad after writing about 100 tapes. HP has released new drive firmware that allows a drive that failed an assessment to now pass the test. The problem is the drive is still bad in that it will run slower across some tracks and stores 10% less data than a good drive.

I don't see HP or any other LTO consortium member getting in front of this problem and providing any honest information about the problem much less a road-map to a solution.

LTFS is nice for archiving but I think the future is going to be using cloud solutions.