Tape Drive overheating?

[sjmclean]

Hi all,

I'm hoping someone can give me some advice. We have a Ultrium 448 Internal tape drive attached to a ML350 G6 server. Things have been running smoothly for 4-5 months.

Recently the drive disappeared from the system(Device Manager showed no sign of it) sometime after completing a sucessful backup. The "READY" light was lit green but the tape would not eject. It would seem the drive locked up and was un-responsive.

I managed to finally get the tape out by turning the server off(shutting down) and waiting a few minutes. I have since removed the drive from the server and attached it to another computer(just the power conector). Upon turning it on and leaving for 10 - 15 minutes the drive locks up again(any tape inside is unable to be ejected). If there is no tape in the drive, trying to put one in shows the mechanics on the drive not working - ie the drive doesnt' accept the tape properly. If I turn off the computer and turn back on the drive will not show any life(no lights or any mechanical signs that the drive is operating) - I have to leave the computer off for several minutes to get it running again.

So it would seem to me that the drive is over heating and essentially shutting down. Is there a requireemnt to have a fan on one of these drives? Although the drive is currently sitting on the top of a case with plenty of ventilation and given that its had 4-5 months of troublefree use I'm assuming that its faulty?

Any advice would be appreciated

Regards

Stewart

[sjmclean]

I should add, that I have updated the firmware to the latest, I briefly used teh L&TT tools and everything seemed to be fine. Lastly the drive itself doesnt' feel overly hot.

[Curtis Ballard]

Use L&TT and save a "Support Ticket" from the drive when it is powered up and post that here.

You mention the drive is "sitting on top of a case" - these drives do have to have forced air cooling. When mounted in a server the fans in the server cool the drive. I have run these on a desktop without a fan and have overheated them doing that. Overheating usually happens during heavy activity and the drive reports an overtemp and shuts down gracefully. That doesn't sound quite like what you describe.

[sjmclean]

Hi there Curtis,

Thanks for your response! Well wouldn't you know it that F&*^ thing is working fine now(seemingly). I have placed in back into the server(I took it out only to troubleshoot - thinking it was a power issue) and low and behold the thing not only powers up fine, has not locked up at all since Sunday afternoon. It has even done Monday nights backup sucesffully.

I'm at a complete loss as to what went on, it makes little sense that the drive would "lock" up after only 10 - 15 minutes running sitting on the top of a case with only power connected. And makes no sense when it was doing the same thing inside the server either connected to just power or fully connected.

I have to say I'm not confident that the drive will last and may look at some alternative backup option to add inaddition to the tape backups.

Can you explain how the drive gracefully shutdown when it overheats?

[sjmclean]

Well, nearly a week of perfect operations I got a call from the staff that the tape wouldn't come out. I've remoted logged in an stopped the Backup Exec software to run the Diagnostics. Unfortuently the drive is not present. So I'm unable to run the diagnostics when the drive is "problematic".

I'm thinking of just trying to log a warranty claim.

[Curtis Ballard]

It does sound like something is wrong with the drive. The behavior you describe doesn't sound like any known issues. If you get any logs and want review comments go ahead and post.

You asked what a "graceful shutdown" looked like. The drive should start rejecting commands with ASC/ASCQ 0Bh/01h for "Thermal Limit Exceeded" and drop into a low power idle to cool down.