Exabyte tape subsystems and dirty heads

[Phil Ritzenthaler]

I have run into a minor probelm with the Exabyte and was wondering if others 
have ran into this . . . dirty heads (I think).

I have a certify program that I run on the Sony P6-120MP cartridges and have
been getting averages of around 2000-4000 retries when writing out and under
a 1000 retries when reading in and verifying.

Well, over the weekend I got a tape with 42,399 retries and so many marginal
spots that I couldn't count them on the graph I printed out!

Every other tape has had the same problem.  I just did a backup of my dataless
clients and had over 11,000 retries on a certified tape that initially had only
2300.

I heard that Exabyte has come out with their own product to clean the heads, 
but my local supplier has yet to get it.  In the mean time, he said to use the
Sony Cleaning Cassette.  I went out and spent $16.00 on this, but the Exabyte
doesn't like it and ejects it within 10 seconds . . .

BTW, Exabyte recommends that the heads be cleaned every 30Gbytes, I have over 
120 Gbytes on the system already . . .

As always, any and all ideas, help, suggestions will be appreciated . . .

Phil Ritzenthaler  The Advanced Computing Center for the Arts & Design  (ACCAD)
Systems Manager    The Ohio State University
                   UUCP: ...!{pyramid,killer}!grumpy.cgrg.ohio-state.edu!phil
                   ARPA: phil at grumpy.cgrg.ohio-state.edu

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