Life expectancy of DLT 4's

[dudenjersey]

Hi,

I've always heard that the life expectancy of a DLT 4 tape is about 2 years, give or take. Has anyone seen any documentation that states this?

thanks in advance,

 

[MikePolis]

I think it's much longer then that all of mine are over 5 years old and have not had one failure.

Here is some info about specific tape life

http://storageconference.org/2003/papers/15_Judge-Media.pdf

Hope that helps
Michael

 

[fwpillow]

Here is an article directed to usage life more than archival life. Where the previous was concerned with environmental storage this one addresses the 1 million passes and how that changes relative to the drive in use with multiple passes per use (some up to 64 for a full tape) but still would be a tape life of 300 years of use with a 7 day retention interval for the backups.

http://www.fujifilm.co.uk/recmedia/pdfs/DLT_Specification.pdf