Chapter 15 — Maintaining the Drives Cleaning a Drive
December 2019 User Guide—Spectra T200, T380, and T680 Libraries
466
CLEANING A DRIVE
Overview Whenever a tape is loaded or unloaded, the read/write heads
are physically cleaned by a brush located within the drive. However, after
reading and writing a large amount of data (the exact amount varies by
drive type and generation) or if read or write errors occur, the drive
requests to be cleaned with a cleaning cartridge. The request is made by
sending a Tape Alert message to the host, and displaying a C on the SCD
for an LTO drive or CLEAN* on the MCD for a TS11xx technology drive.
The notification is also posted to the library’s Drive Details screen
(Figure 292 on page 468) and the DLM drive health icon for the drive
changes to yellow (see Using the Drive Health Icons on page 315 for
additional information).
Using drives with dirty heads can reduce drive performance, decrease
usable tape capacity, and result in read/write failures which can eventually
interrupt data storage.
If you have Auto Drive Clean enabled and the drive is in a partition with
an associated cleaning partition, these cleanings are performed
automatically. See Creating a Cleaning Partition on page 185 for
information about configuring a cleaning partition.
It may also be possible to configure the host software to automatically
clean the drives, with a cleaning tape stored in the partition, when the
software is notified that drive cleaning is necessary.
If no automatic cleaning process is configured, you must manually clean
the drive. If you ignore a cleaning request for too long, the library
generates a warning system message.
User Privilege Requirements When Auto Drive Clean is enabled for the
storage partition and a cleaning cartridge is available in the cleaning
partition, cleanings are performed automatically and do not require user
intervention.
If Auto Drive Clean is not enabled, any user with operator privileges who is
assigned to the partition and all users with superuser or administrator
privileges can manually clean a drive without an associated cleaning
partition by importing a cleaning cartridge into the storage partition’s entry/
exit pool, if necessary, and using the Inventory screen to manually move the
cleaning cartridge to the drive (see No Cleaning Partition Present on
page 471).
Only a user with superuser or administrator privileges can move a cleaning
cartridge stored in the partition using the BlueScale web interface (RLC).
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