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Comment by op00to | Hacker News Reader

Tape drives are consumable. LTO tape is abrasive, this cleans the heads but also wears them down. I used to manage a scientific computing facility with a PB scale rape archive. We ingested maybe 50 TB a day to tape, and would chew through one of the 8 drives at least twice a week.

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I know this is a typo, and I don't usually point out such things, but maybe fix "rape archive"

It certainly made me stop and reread the statement.

I didn't even notice until I read the comment below. My brain just saw tape, I had to go back and reread it to make sure it hadn't been corrected yet.

Was this same generation drive and tape? I've only seen this be this bad when doing MP (LTO4/LTO5) reads/writes in BaFe-targeting drives (LTO6/LTO7).

These old MP tapes are like sandpaper to new drives.

At work we also refer to LTO5 tapes as sandpaper tapes - glad we're not the only ones with the realization. If we have a significant restore involving archived lto5s, we immediately plan for additional wear and drive repairs. :(

That being said, this does apply within generation to a lesser extent as well.

I might have worked at your company/project. :)

Actually, yes, a bit of account stalking says you have. m( Hey there! Folks on the team still miss you.

> Tape drives are consumable. LTO tape is abrasive, this cleans the heads but also wears them down.

Is it possible to replace the RW head on a tape drive? I guess the manufacturers generally don't want this to be easily replaceable, so they can sell more drives...

Almost universally the business model for significant deployments would be that you have maintenance contracts anyway. That's kind of how the tape business works, certainly if you have libraries as well. In that case you get those drives RMA'd.

We had a service contract. The drive basically contacted IBM and I had a new drive on my desk in 4 hours. I made enough friends at IBM that they left a stock of spares.

Are you using green media? Green media is very abrasive and it's recommended to burn them in before usage. This can literally saves you thousands upon thousands in tape drives.

I'm curious for more details. Are these full-height or half-height drives?

Was this "rape" archive at the Vatican perhaps?

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