Cleaning Drives Using The Library User Interface; Check For Drives That Require Cleaning - Oracle StorageTek SL150 User Manual

Maintaining Tape Drives
In the graphical library map, move to the mailslot and click on a cleaning
4.
cartridge.
When the context menu appears, select Move Tape. The Move Tape panel appears
5.
at the top of the screen. The Source type field should be set to Mailslot and the
cartridge that you chose should be listed (you may change this selection if
desired).
In the graphical library map, click on the reserved slot where the cleaning
6.
cartridge will reside. The Destination type field of the Move Tape panel should
now identify the Slot location that you selected (you may change this selection if
desired).
In the Move Tape panel, press the OK button to perform the move or Cancel to
7.
abort.
When the Move Tape panel shows that the move is complete, press the OK button
8.
to close the panel.
Repeat the above procedure from step 3 to step 7 until all cleaning cartridges have
9.
been loaded.

Cleaning Drives Using the Library User Interface

Oracle does not generally recommend cleaning tape drives yourself if your host
application can be configured to manage cleaning automatically. LTO drives rarely
require cleaning with external cartridges, so monitoring for cleaning requests is best
left to software (see
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 that can be detected by the
SL150 tape library and by 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.
7-6 StorageTek SL150 Modular Tape Library User's Guide
"Selecting a Cleaning Strategy" on page 3-7 for more information).