HP OEM LTO-3 Tape Best Practices..

[LVDave]

We have an Overland NEO2000 tape library with 2 HP LTO-3 drives. Having been used to working with older tape technologies, where drive cleaning was endless, I'm astounded with how little cleaning LTO drives require. We've had the system for going on two years, in October, and have not been prompted for any cleaning yet.. After about a year of use, I got nervous and queried Overland and they said "only as requested by the drive", so we continued to use the drives, backing up over 5TB/wk, with zero problems. After another 6 months went by, I asked them again if the lack of cleaning requests was normal, and they said yes, but possibly a manual cleaning every six months. So in Jan of this year I ran a cleaning tape on both of the drives. My question is a two-parter.. 1) Are we on the right track on maintainance of these drives? Is there anything else we need to do maintainance-wise on them? 2) I read the HP Drive cleaning matrix webpage elsewhere on the HP site, and it refers to "excessive soft write errors" as a criteria for cleaning.. I have no idea what would be considered "excessive", but for the fact that some of our older tapes, are showing up to 70 soft read errors, but only a couple are showing ANY soft write errors. When should I start looking at replacement of tapes here??

Dave