MSL4048 1840 FC tape drive failures

[Tom Riley1]

I have a customer with dual MSL4048's 2 LTO-4 Ultrium FC libraries AJ038A. These were installed in February by HP. As of yesterday, all 4 tape drives have failed and been replaced. 2 replaced because of high temperature warnings, one DOA, and the final with an unknown error. I don't see any other postings, and realize the drives are fairly new. Has anyone seen anything like this?

[TapeDrive Killer]

Hi Tom It will be better if you make a device analisys test on all device using LTT then generate a support ticket and save it here.

www.hp.com/support/tapetools

Regards

Pablo ALvarado
Tape Storage DPX

[Tom Riley1]

Here are the results from the last failure. Incidentally, all power supplies/fans were replaced on all drives last week.
The IDB backup this morning gave errors about invalid device id.

Device manager on the servers and LTT now only show a single drive present in the library. A LTT test of the library reported:

|__ Test 'Device Analysis' started on device 'HP MSL G3 Series' at address '4/0.0.1'
|__ Analysis Results
|__ Started Device Analysis
|__ Device Analysis version V05.03.2007
|__ Firmware rev 6.00 is up to date as of Mon Dec 10 19:00:00 2007.
|__
|__ The library reports 2 drives but the library statistics log does not report 2
|__ fans installed. Each enabled drive should have a fan. Please check that all
|__ drives are enabled and the fans are turning.
|__
|__ Service Suggestions for Recent Events
|__ None
|__ Device Analysis completed, and warnings have been reported.

[TapeDrive Killer]

Please attacht the support ticket

[Tom Riley1]

Sorry, I don't have the ticket, nor access to the customer system to get it. I was generally trying to find out whether anyone else was having problems with these drives. 4 drives failing out of 4 can't be normal. I realize these are break/fix issues and perhaps not fully diagnosed. Thanks for your reply.

[Tom O'Toole]

Have had an MSL6000 series library with two 1840s (in this series of library, they are scsi
drives that get connected to an NSR (storage router) in the library to provide FC connectivity).

They have been working great from day 1.

[YAQUB_1]

Hi,

Can U try to update tape library firmware (Ex. NSR, FC card, Robtic Arm, Tape Drive etc.)...after firmware update then check what status...is

Rgds--Yaqub

[Curtis Ballard]

Unfortunately some of the issues you have seen are known issues with L&TT but not product issues. The temperature settings for LTO-4 drives were set incorrectly in L&TT and that is being fixed. The temperature in the LTO-4 drive is measured at a pretty hot location on the controller board and is much higher than the tape path temperature. The temperature at the point where it is measured is fine up to 77 degrees C and L&TT was reporting temperature warnings at 50 degrees C which is a very normal temperature.

I just saw a report of the drive fans not turning on another library and am looking into it. Please check and see if the fans really are failed before replacing a drive.

[Curtis Ballard]

You say that the system currently isn't reporting one of the drives. Please check carefully for connectivity issues before assuming the drive is faulty. FC connectivity issues are almost never a problem with the drive. There are lots of things to check, damaged cables, dirty connectors, switch settings, drive port settings (autodetect, 2 G, 4 G, fabric, loop), zoning, etc.

[Tom Riley1]

Thanks for all the replies. The issue with L &TT makes a lot of sense. I should have pointed out, we are not handling the support directly, it's all HP, so I'm assuming they have verified the fan was not turning on the latest episode. Of course all fans/power supplies had been replaced the previous week.