4-4 Operating and Cleaning the Drive
Handling and Storing a Cartridge
Data reliability is a function of many variables and may be improved by suitable handling and storage. The user should follow these guidelines:
■Do not drop cartridges.
■Make sure that the air around the drive and the cartridge storage area is clean.
■Expose a cartridge to the actual operating environment for at least four hours prior to use.
■Do not expose a cartridge to high humidity for an extended period unless the cartridge can be dried out for three or four days outside its packaging box prior to use.
■Reject worn or excessively noisy cartridges.
■Reject cartridges which contain hard read or write errors.
■Reject cartridges which repeatedly require large numbers of blocks per track to be rewritten.
Compaq SLR Tape Drive User Guide