HP 3000 Manuals HP 3000 Manuals
Cleaning Tape Heads and Choosing Your Cassettes
The environment in which you use your tape drive and store the cassettes
helps provide optimum conditions for good performance. It is also
important that you take care to ensure that reliability continues. You
can do this through regular cleaning of the tape heads in the drive and
through correct handling of the cassettes. Cleaning the tape heads helps
prevent problems of data integrity in two areas:
* head clogs, when a speck of dirt adheres to the tape head and
prevents data from being read or written correctly
* scratches on the tape, usually caused by dirt particles becoming
trapped between a tape guide and the tape and scratching the
surface as the tape passes by
Any of the following conditions indicate that the tape heads need
cleaning:
* after every 25 hours of use
* if the tape drive indicates that it is correcting an excessive
number of errors (See your tape drive manual for details.)
* when the green Caution signal displayed by the cassette light,
located on the front panel, is active
* when both the cassette and drive lights are on yellow
To clean the tape heads
Use the following procedure to clean the tape head:
1. Insert the cleaning cassette, product number HP 92283K, into the
tape drive slot. (Do not use swabs or other means of cleaning the
heads.) The tape drive automatically loads the tape and cleans
the heads. When the cleaning is complete, the tape drive unloads
and ejects the tape.
2. After each cleaning, record on paper that the cleaning cassette
has been used.
3. Discard the cleaning cassette after 25 uses. Ensure that you have
another cleaning cassette to use.
To choose cassettes labeled DDS
It is important that you use cassettes labeled "DDS" in your DDS-format
drive. Do not use cassettes labeled "DAT," because the media is not
certified and, therefore, integrity cannot be guaranteed. In addition,
DAT cassettes have a different mechanical specification, which may cause
them to jam in the mechanism. Damage caused by the use of non-DDS media
may invalidate the warranty on your tape drive.
To determine number of DDS cassettes needed
The total number of cassettes needed depends on your backup routine;
however, it is advisable to keep extra cassettes for the following:
* a spare set for full backup
* a spare cassette for use for diagnostics by your Hewlett-Packard
customer engineer
* cassettes for file transfers
* cassettes for any archival storage you may require