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:

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.
After each cleaning, record on paper that the cleaning cassette has been used.
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

Cleaning Tape Heads and Choosing Your Cassettes

Technical documentation

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To clean the tape heads

To choose cassettes labeled DDS

To determine number of DDS cassettes needed