Using Your Digital Data Storage (DDS) Tape Drive

DDS Tape Drive and Data Cassette Descriptions

tions of the tape during backups or restores.

You notice that when you do backups and restores the tape stops and starts fre- quently.

Cleaning the Tape Heads

Clean the heads of your tape drive after every 25 hours of tape drive use or if the Media Wear (Caution) signal is displayed on the LED.

NOTICE:Only use HP Cleaning Cassettes (HP92283K) to clean the tape heads. Do not use swabs or other means of cleaning the tape heads.

Follow this procedure to clean the tape heads:

1Insert the cleaning cassette into the drive. The tape automatically loads the cas- sette and cleans the heads. At the end of the cleaning cycle, the drive ejects the cassette.

2Write the current date on the label on the cleaning cassette so that you know how many times you have used it. Discard the cleaning cassette after you have used it 25 times.

Media Restrictions

If you interchange media between other HP workstation DDS tape drives, note that data cassettes with compressed data can only be read by tape drives that have data compression capabilities. This includes data cassettes that contain both compressed and noncompressed data.

Setting the Write-Protect Tab on a Data Cassette

You can only store or change information on a data cassette when the write- protect tab is in the write position. So, before trying to write to the data cas- sette, make sure that the write-protect tab is in the write position, as shown in Figure 16.

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