service surestore dat24

[Will Scoggins]

Is it nec. to ever service an internal surestore dat24 system?

I'm tired of going through one dat24/year, and now my 4th one is starting to make noises, so I would like to have someone do a $100 service rather than have to buy a new one in 2 months at $800. We don't drive our cars 100,000 miles without service. And this is not a disposable product like printers.

thanks.

[Dave Dewar]

Hi Will,

I don't know what problems you have had with your last three products. There are some support tools such as LTT, available on:

http://www.hp.com/cgi-bin/cposupport/swindex.pl?p=hpsurestor9641&l=en&c=Diagnostic

That allow many customer to solve issues issues with their tape drive products without the need for exchanges. We see many NTF's on our tape drive products.

I also do not know how much use your DAT24 products get in a year. However, the specification of these products is for a 12% duty cycle and this means about 1-1.5 tapes per day backup/restore. Exceeding this specification will result in shortened life.

Poor performance due to system setup issues can also result in shortened life as the tape drive has to do a lot of stopping and starting becuase the system can not keep up with it.

As far as a service goes, HP do not offer actual physical service on the product. However, the LTT does offer some remote servicing options such as firmware upgrades, write recalibration and diagnostics.

Cheers

Dave Dewar.

[Dan_139]

Just to clear up the 12% duty cycle statement; it's not how many tapes but the time. The DAT24 drive should not be running for more than 2.88 hours a day. How many tapes you use depends on trnsfer rate, block size, and compression!

[Eugeny Brychkov]

In addition to excellent replies above I would add that you need to clean DAT/DDS drive regularly - after each 5 full backups or 20 tape pulling hours and not to use expired cleaning tape
Eugeny

[Dave Dewar]

Dan,

Of course the 12% duty cycle spec refers to time. It doesn't make sense otherwise.
In my response I estimated the number of tapes per day with reasonable performance etc to help Will judge his own usage - much easier to know how many tapes you use rather than look through app logs to work out backup/restore times.
Hence my statement said "about" and gave a range from 1-1.5 tapes.

Cheers,

Dave Dewar

[Will Scoggins]

Thanks guys for all of your comments,

I do a complete backup of 18 GB's on a single W2K server, both partitions and system state every night on one tape. I rotate a new tape every night.

I have been warned not to use cleaning tapes, some say they destroy the heads rather than improve them. The issue is not really a data quality issue, it's a mechanical issue. All of the dat24's I have thrown away in the last 4 years had mechanical problems, and they simply lock up, if memory serves me well.

I will go to the site suggested by the first person to respond, from this window I can't see anymore who that was. But that is what I needed, and I will try some of the diagnostic tools.

Cheers again...Will