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Version 2.20 - September 1998
TAKING CARE OF YOUR TAPE DRIVE
Tape drives need to be taken care of quite carefully. You should refer to your drive’s operator’s
manual for more details on this but some general guidelines are:
• As routine maintenance, the heads should be cleaned after every 25 hours or so of use.
Basically, clean the heads regularly.
• To clean the heads of your drive, only use the head cleaner recommended in your drive’s
documentation.
• If your drive is a SCSI DAT drive, do not use standard audio DAT head cleaners.
• If you are using a SCSI DAT drive, avoid using audio DATs. Use only those tapes recom-
mended by your drive’s manufacturer.
• Keep the drive in a dust free environment. Dust on the heads could lead to a loss of data
integrity and failed backups/restores.
• Don’t smoke near the tape drive. This can really clog the heads!
• Do not try to use the tape drive if you move it from environments of differing temperatures
and humidity. Moisture on the head as a result of condensation could damage the tape. If
you must move the drive from one place to another, turn it on and leave it for a while before
attempting to use it to give any condensation a chance to evaporate. Consult your drive’s
operator’s manual for details on this.
• If you must manually eject the tape, there can be a few seconds delay before the tape is
ejected. Do not power down the drive in this period as you may damage the heads and/or
the tape.
Also, don’t forget to pay attention to the normal considerations of SCSI:
• Make sure the total length of the buss doesn’t exceed 6 metres.
• Make sure the correct devices are terminated (this should be the first and last in the chain
with all other being unterminated).
• Make sure that no devices on the buss share the same SCSI ID.
Etc..
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