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3 Preventive Maintenance
The only routine maintenance required by the tape drive
is regular cleaning of the tape drive heads and tape path.
Use only an Exabyte or Exabyte-approved 8mm Cleaning
Cartridge. Proper storage and maintenance of your data
cartridges will maximize the shelf life of your tapes and
assure data integrity.
Important
Using a cleaning method other than the Exabyte
8mm Cleaning Cartridge or an Exabyte-approved
cleaning cartridge will void the warranty for the
tape drive and can lead to premature head wear.
Determining When to Clean the Tape Drive
You should clean the tape drive’s heads and tape path
after every 30 tape motion hours.Thiscleaning
frequency is independent of the format in which you
writeandreaddata.However,ifyouareusingthetape
drive in a particularly dirty environment, or if you
operate it infrequently, you may want to clean the tape
drive more often than every 30 tape motion hours.
Some backup software programs may notify you when
the tape drive needs cleaning. Refer to the documentation
for your backup software for more information.
Note: The tape drive keeps track of its tape motion
hours internally. To determine when the tape
drive needs to be cleaned, issue a REQUEST
SENSE (03h) command and look at the setting of
the CLN and CLND bits (byte 21, bits 3 and 4). If
the CLN bit is set to 1, the tape drive needs to be
cleaned. This bit is reset to 0 when you perform a
successful cleaning cycle. The CLND bit is set to 1
when the tape drive has been cleaned and is reset
to 0 when the next REQUEST SENSE command is
received.
December 1993 EXB-8500/EXB-8500c 29