1. Administrator's Guide
  2. Cartridge Management
  3. Identifying Expired Cartridges

Identifying Expired Cartridges

When tape cartridges exceed their design life, the media can wear thin, and mechanical parts, like the cartridges' gate wearing out. When cartridges reach the end of their engineered life, you should consider migrating the data on them to new cartridges and retiring the old cartridges. This avoids the slight risk of either mechanical cartridge components failing or the data being unreadable.

A cartridges' chronological age and its usage are different. Some 9840 cartridges have been in use for a decade, but they have different usage patterns. Some have been used daily while others are used for deep archive and are rarely accessed. Identifying the cartridges that are past their design life is critical.

To identify the cartridges that need to be retired, you must determine their usage. A cartridge's usage is recorded in the cartridge's directory, and before a cartridge is dismounted, the drive updates the directory.

For cartridges in libraries controlled by ACSLS:

  • For some libraries that ACSLS manages, cartridge usage is displayed as a percentage of “warranty life" and “end-of-life".

  • For prior ACSLS releases and libraries, the ACSLS access_count can be displayed with the display command and the volrpt utility.

Cartridge End-of-Life Percentages

With modern libraries running the latest firmware and StorageTek drives running the latest firmware, the tape drive reports the cartridge's “end-of-warranty-life" and “end-of-life percentages" to the library when the cartridge is dismounted. Then, the library reports this to ACSLS. ACSLS saves this information in its database, and you can see it by running the ACSLS display volume command. See Using display Command Options.

Example: To display all T9840 cartridges, with ACS, LSM, media, and end_of_life information, sorted by end_of_life: 
display volume * -media STK1R -f acs lsm media end_of_life warranty_life -s end_of_life

Specifically this information is reported to ACSLS for these libraries and drives:

Libraries:

  • SL3000

  • SL8500 (with the 4.10 firmware)

Tape Drives:

  • All T10000 tape drives - with 1.38 firmware

  • T9840C and T9840D – with 1.42 firmware

Access Counts

In many cases, cartridge end-of-life reporting is not available. In these cases, the ACSLS access_count is the best information available. The ACSLS database records the number of times that volumes have been selected or accessed. This can be used to estimate the number of times that they have been mounted, if the cartridge has stayed in a group of connected libraries (within an ACS).

This information is collected regardless of library type, so it is maintained for SL8500s and SL3000s. ACSLS has saved this information for decades, so even if you are still on down-level releases, you still have this information. However, this data has limits. The biggest one is that when a cartridge is entered into a library, the count is set to zero (0).

Information is retained about volumes for the retention period you have set, so counts are preserved when a cartridge is ejected from an ACS and re-entered into the same or different ACS within the retention period. The default retention period is five days. However, if a volume is ejected from a library and remains off-site for longer than the retention period for volume information, the information about the volume is deleted from the ACSLS database.

For cartridges that have remained in a single library these ACSLS access counts are very useful. For a T9840 cartridge, if the ACSLS access_count is over 11,000, the cartridge in question is near the end of its life, if not already over its end of life. T10000 cartridges have an end-of-life value of 16,000 mounts.

Because ACSLS provides tools so you can preserve and migrate your database information when you install new releases of ACSLS, this information can go back over a decade. In the absence of data from the cartridge, this is the only option.

ACSLS Cartridge Mount Count Details

The ACSLS field is called access_count. It counts:

  • Mounts (dismounts are not counted)

  • Enters and ejects (enters and ejects are often rare)

  • Moves (although the move command using cmd_proc is rarely used, and it is not available to ACSAPI clients)

The access_count is mainly a count of the number of times the cartridge was mounted. ACSLS remembers ejected volumes for the ABSENT_VOLUME_RETENTION_PERIOD (default of 5 days). When cartridges are moved between ACSs and sent off-site and brought back on-site, ACSLS can remember the access_count.

You can see the ACSLS access_count using both:

  • The ACSLS display command.

    To see all 9840 data cartridges, sorted by access count, and also showing media type, ACS, and LSM: 

    display volume * -media STK1R -s access_count -f media access_count acs lsm

  • The volrpt utility.

    volrpt can be sorted by use (access_count), and can only include selected fields. For example, a custom volrpt containing vol_id, media type, access_count, and location, can be output to a flat file for further processing by a script.

Cartridge Warranty and End-of-life Thresholds

The warranty and end-of-life thresholds are presented in the table below:

Table 8-6 End-of-Life Thresholds

Threshold Mounts

9x40 (T9840 and T9940) Warranty

10,000

9x40 End-of-life

11,000

T10000 Warranty

15,000

T10000 End-of-life

16,000