Determine the Number of Cleaning Cartridges

Cleaning cartridges clean tape drives. The number of cartridges required depends on partitioning and your drive cleaning strategy.

Note:

Always use new cleaning cartridges. To the library, every newly imported cleaning cartridge is new, with a usage count of zero. So if you load used cleaning cartridges, you will not have an accurate count of the number of remaining cleanings.

At least two cleaning cartridges should be available for drive cleaning. The total number of cleaning cartridges in the library and where they need to reside depends on your drive cleaning strategy and partitioning configuration.

• If using library auto-cleaning or manual cleaning: Oracle recommends that you provide two, new, LTO universal (CU) cleaning cartridges into reserved system slots. The partitioning configuration does not affect this number.

• If using host-managed cleaning: the number of cleaning cartridges required depends on your partitioning configuration.

  For a non-partitioned library, Oracle recommends that you provide two, new, LTO universal (CU) cleaning cartridges placed into storage slots.

  For a partitioned library, Oracle recommends that you provide two, new, LTO universal (CU) cleaning cartridges per partition. A host application cannot access drives or library slots that are not in the partition that it controls. So each partition must contain cleaning media. For example, three partitions would require three cleaning tapes at a minimum and six for best drive availability