[Info-vax] TLZ7

[Alan Frisbie]

On 11/4/2010 3:40 PM, Kari Uusimäki wrote:

> DLT, SDLT or LTO tape drives are very reliable and have much better
> performance and therefore they are mostly used in production environments.

In general I would agree with you, but I have experienced a
tape failure rate (with new tapes) between ten and twenty percent.

Once they have been successfully used, they seem to stay good for
many more uses, but I never trust new tapes.   This applies to
both SDLT-1 160/320GB and SDLT-2 300/600GB tapes.   Just last
month I bought ten of each, and two in each batch were bad
(parity / CRC errors).

With DAT tapes, they generally failed with crinkled tape
hanging out of the cartridge, but I didn't have much of a
problem with parity errors as long as I regularly used the
cleaning tape.

Alan "The other AEF" Frisbie