Ultrium tape life

[Ed Kwan_1]

We are using Omniback with Ultrium tape drives. HP sales said their tape can be re-write up to 40,000 times, but an Omniback whitepaper indicate the tape life should be 80% of 250 times.

Can someone please advise on how many writes a Ultrium tape can sustain before being considered as "poor" ?
Thanks.

[Rok Zemljaric]

Hi,

The practice in our company is that new tapes are used for daily backups. After a while (this is usually a period of one year) these media are used for archive backups with permanent protection. This means that the media have been re-written around 50 - 60 times.

I am sure that the "stamina" of the Ultrium tapes is at least 1x more than that but I believe it's better not to exhaust it too much (you still might need it to perform restores).

You can set the media pools that you're using in OmniBack so that after the specified number of re-writes the medium is marked as fair. Afterwards, you use the medium for the archive backup.

Regards,
Rok

[Rok Zemljaric]

Hi,

maybe this will help as well:

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0x7a0c36e69499d611abdb0090277a778c,00.html

Regards,
Rok

[Marino Meloni_1]

hi

here is the info from HP site,
as you can see the life is calculated in passes,
then as each backup take lots of passes on the tape you just have to calculate ]knowing how many passes one of your backup take ;-) ]

bye
marino

[Marino Meloni_1]

sorry I forgot the link

http://www.hp.com/cposupport/information_storage/support_doc/lpg75093.html

[Ed Kwan_1]

Thank you all very much for responding.

Ed