Tape Library

Hello, I'm trying to find out the general 'lifespan' left of my LTO drive with the IBM tape diagnostic tools. Anyone who's familiar with how HP do it, you get a report on margins and tape head life, with a report saying 99% life left, something like that. How would I find such in the IBM tape software? I've had a good look through the logs but can't find anything looking like such? Thanks.

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Anthony C
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Hi Anthony,

I was looking for kind of similar information regarding data cartridges and i found following information which you can obtain through REST API of your tape library:

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Jamshaid Amjad
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Original Message:
Sent: Thu January 23, 2025 10:38 AM
From: Anthony C
Subject: Tape Drive Diagnostics

Hello, I'm trying to find out the general 'lifespan' left of my LTO drive with the IBM tape diagnostic tools. Anyone who's familiar with how HP do it, you get a report on margins and tape head life, with a report saying 99% life left, something like that. How would I find such in the IBM tape software? I've had a good look through the logs but can't find anything looking like such? Thanks.

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Anthony C
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@Anthony C The drive MTBF and lifetime are designed to exceed expected usage but are reduced with harsh usage. Harsh usage includes, but is not limited to the following:

a) Usage outside of tape drive specifications.
b) Environmental conditions resulting in corrosion of tape head elements. Examples include exposure to condensing conditions, chlorine, or other corrosive elements.
c) Media asperities or defects which cause shorts or damage in head elements.
d) Green Media processing exceeding 1000 equivalent end to end cartridge passes. Green Media is defined as media which is being passed over the recording head for the first time (i.e., a cartridge which has less than full capacity written to the media).

The POST B Performance diagnostic may be used to determine how well the tape drive writes data. If the degradation exceeds the threshold a Recovered Error is reported with the FSC FLAG of the sense data set to the percentage. However, there is no percent of drive lifetime remaining that is reported by the tape drive or by ITDT.

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Kevin Butt
IBM, Tape Development Ecosystem
Tape SCSI Architect, T10 Representative
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Original Message:
Sent: Thu January 23, 2025 10:38 AM
From: Anthony C
Subject: Tape Drive Diagnostics

Hello, I'm trying to find out the general 'lifespan' left of my LTO drive with the IBM tape diagnostic tools. Anyone who's familiar with how HP do it, you get a report on margins and tape head life, with a report saying 99% life left, something like that. How would I find such in the IBM tape software? I've had a good look through the logs but can't find anything looking like such? Thanks.

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Anthony C
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