SDLT reliability

[Steve Reece_3]

A mate of mine has a number of clients with HP SDLT tape drives, both 110/220 and 320 GB varieties. Whilst they had no problems with DLT, the SDLT drives have given them no end of problems.
One of his clients has had their drive replaced four or five times, along with media replaced by HP because of tape-edge damage.

Has anybody else had less than optimal performance out of their SDLT drives?

(The drive that the customer who's suffered so many replacements is at the current firmware version and is suffering parity errors on new, HP-supplied, Quantum tapes.)

Thanks in advance

Steve

[matthew robey]

Steve,

yep, I've had to have an SDLT drive replaced 5 or six times.

Hp have blamed the tapes, however it is always the same drive that need replacing (I have 4),
and different tapes have been used.

The backup will run ok and then after a variable ammount of time (ie not always at the same point) the backup will fail.

Matt

[Peter Quodling]

Saw some problem with SDLT's at one site a while back, however have been having issues with LTO's at recent site. It's all flakey and just a matter of knowing how to escalate with the Service folk.

Peter Q

[John Abbott_2]

Just to keep a balanced view... we have 10 320sdlt drives and have used Maxell, Quantum (mostly), Fuji & Sony type I tapes.

We've had no drive swap outs yet and have had about half of the drives since they became available (so a mixture of Compaq and HP badges).

About 6 of the 10 units are used daily.

I think the MTBF for SDLT media is the same as DLT.

Do you use a cleaning tape on the drives regularly? I've been told only to clean them when asked.

Kind Regards
John.

[Jeffrey Willemsen]

It may well have to do something with some batches or manufacturers of the tape cartridges. I see a few drives every month that are brought in with afore mentioned problems (and diagnostics reports tape edge damage) while the drives work perfectly without problems when using another tape cartridge. SDLT itself seems reliable, some cartridges that were acting up did well again after degaussing them.

[DICTU OpenVMS]

At my current site it depends. Once in a while a drive needs to be replaced. After that it runs fine for a very long time. We have about 8 MSL's with about 20 drive's. Most of them are used daily. We have set the MSL to autoclean and reserved 1 slot for the cleaning tape...

[Robert Atkinson]

We have 2 SDLT libraries and 2 internal standalone drives.

In general, they've been better than previous drives (DLT III, DLTIV) but still do require the ocassional swap out or jammed tape.

Robert.

[Steve Reece_3]

As Matthew commented, the drives seem to work for a variable amount of time and HP are apparently saying that the fault is either with the media or with the drive.

For the client that's had four or five drives, no problems with the SCSI bus or the adapter are indicated. The client has had a brand new Quantum tape that has failed, the tape being replaced after the previous one suffered tape edge damage.

[Peter Quodling]

Personally, my favourite tape devices are STK 9840/9940's but now that Sun Microsystems have bought storagetek - who knows.

A quote from a former colleague who worked in DEC tape engineering (TK70 etc) will always stick in my mind. He was asked at a DECUS what he thought of exabyte drives. Without blinking, he responded... "They are great for backups.... But terrible for restores...." Nuff said...

q

[Aaron Lewis_1]

Steve, we had been having a lot of difficulty with some of our SDLT drives. They were constantlly logging errors, around 50 errors on every backup(140GB.)About once a month one of them would fail, we even had one that needed to be replaced 3 times in a week! Our FE decided to replace the SCSI controller as well, even though there were no indications of any errors on the controller. Since then we have gone about 5 weeks without any issues, well tape issues anyway. We still throw a few errors with every backup, but now it's only 2 or 3 a night. The next SDLT we have that fails, I'm going to request a new controller too.