Cleaning Drives As Needed Using The Library User Interface; Check For Drives That Require Cleaning - Oracle storagetek sl150 User Manual

System Reserved Slots are storage slots that are for the exclusive use of the SL150
library itself. To use the Drive Auto Clean feature, you must reserve at least one
system slot for cleaning media.
Press the Next button to exit the Configure Library Settings worksheet.
8.
The Configure Library Partitioning worksheet appears.
Press the Next button to skip the Configure Library Partitioning worksheet.
9.
The Summary of Configuration Changes sheet appears.
On the Summary of Configuration Changes sheet, check the Accept all changes
10.
check box and press the Apply button to enable library controlled drive cleaning.

Cleaning Drives as Needed Using the Library User Interface

Oracle does not generally recommend cleaning tape drives with the library user
interface. LTO drives rarely require cleaning with external cartridges, so monitoring
for cleaning requests is best left to the library or the host application software. If you
must rely on the procedure described in this section when maintaining your drives,
you need to understand when and why cleaning is required and why, when unneeded,
it may damage the drive.
Linear Tape Open (LTO) drives are self-cleaning in normal use and do not require
routine cleaning with cleaning cartridges. Internal brushes remove debris and
contaminants before they have a chance to build up on recording surfaces. Cleaning
cartridges are only needed if the recording surfaces of the drive frequently come into
direct contact with the recording media. For example, when slow I/O causes excessive
repositioning and retensioning of the tape media (a phenomenon called shoe-shining),
the tape media wears rapidly and the normal gap between the tape surface and drive's
recording surfaces becomes hard to maintain. When the shoe-shining is prolonged or
repeated, magnetic debris from worn tape surfaces transfers to the recording heads of
the drive, where it forms hard deposits that cause read/write errors. When the LTO
drive detects excessive numbers of these read/write errors, it automatically requests
supplemental cleaning by sending standard tape alerts to the SL150 tape library and to
most host applications.
Cleaning cartridges have to be abrasive to wear away the hard deposits that come with
heavy use. So using these cartridges on the polished recording surfaces of a clean drive
causes significant damage. For this reason, use the SL150 user interface to clean drives
only when you are prompted to do so, either by a fault message in the Health Table
(code 9030, DRIVE_NEEDS_CLEANING) or in the Health property on the drive
properties sheet. Never clean drives according to a calendar schedule or number of media
mounts.
On the other hand, you should not ignore cleaning requests. When an LTO drive
requests cleaning, you can be sure that external cleaning is necessary to restore drive
performance and minimize future problems.

Check for Drives that Require Cleaning

Log in to the browser-based user interface under the Operator, Service, or
1.
Administrator role.
If the Library Health indicator on the dashboard bar at the top of the interface is
2.
Degraded, click on it, and examine the Health Table for code 9030, DRIVE_
NEEDS_CLEANING.
Maintaining Tape Drives
Maintenance and Upgrades 8-9