AIT DRIVE CLICKS INTERMITANT

[Tobez]

Ive noticed on various AIT drives we have here, 1 being a compaq 50/100 and the other a SONY Autoloader SA500c that they can be backing up fine then all of a sudden i hear 3 or 4 clicks, no errors happen but i wondered why it makes this noise, It happened on both compaq and sony drives ?

Anyone else seen or heard this ?

thanks

 

[UlteraTapeRAID]

When an AIT drive is accessing a tape media and reaches a write retry limit or read retry limit, it attempts to clean the tape head with an internal mechanical head cleaner arm that makes a click sound when it is activated.

If this process continues, the TAPE LED will begin to flash slowly (1/2 sec ON, 1/2 sec OFF) indicating the tape drive needs cleaning or the tape media is getting excessive soft errors (soft errors are corrected by the helical scan Read-After-Write (RAW) logic).

SUGGESTIONS
1. Clean the tape drive using an AIT Cleaning tape that is
not expired.
2. Try a different media.
3. Look into Tape RAID solutions that provide fault
tolerance when a tape drive needs service or a tape
media becomes damaged or unreadable.