Maintenance And Reliability; Maintenance; Head Cleaning - Seagate STD124000N Product Manual

Maintenance and Reliability

Maintenance

Head Cleaning

Product Manual
If excessive dust or debris collects at one or more of the heads, magnetic media
may become unreadable or unwriteable. This situation may occur infrequently, or
not at all, depending on the media used.
Whenever the green cartridge-in-place status LED flashes, you should clean the
drive heads with a cleaning cartridge.
Also, as routine maintenance, you should clean the drive heads after the first four
hours of tape movement of a new cartridge and after every 25 hours of read/write
operation.
Note. The slowly flashing green LED may indicate that a tape is damaged or is
nearing the end of its life. If cleaning the head does not correct the flashing
LED condition, replace the cartridge. The slowly flashing LED does not
indicate a loss of data nor does it affect SCSI operation. (A slowly flashing
green LED in conjunction with the yellow LED indicates the presence of a
prerecorded audio tape.) For a description of LED operation, see Chapter 4.
To clean the drive heads, use only a Seagate-qualified DDS cleaning cartridge
designed for DDS drives. Seagate offers a cleaning cartridge, Model M91301, that
you can order.
The DDS cleaning cartridge contains the correct recognition holes to allow the drive
to recognize that it is a cleaning cartridge. Follow these general guidelines to use
the cleaning cartridge:
z
Insert the cleaning cartridge. The drive loads and runs the cartridge for about
30 seconds, then ejects the cartridge.
Note. Each time the cleaning cartridge is loaded, a new, unused portion of
cleaning tape is advanced over the entire tape path. Eventually, the
entire tape is used, and a new cleaning cartridge is required. (A cleaning
cartridge provides approximately 30 uses.) The drive does not rewind
the cartridge. If the cleaning cartridge has been used, the drive ejects
the cartridge and the amber LED flashes rapidly.
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