LTO-4 Retirment Policy
- 10 years ago
Those status 84 - are those SCSI sense key code "Recorded entity not found " ?. Usually when tape drive is on the decline, they start to throw a growing number of "Recorded entity not found". Also read and write speed is not where near original speed because of read/write corrections.
With a 3 week retention, max usage over a 4 year period will be no more than 70 full writes. That is not enough to wear out a tape.
See the Tape durability table at Wikipedia (Pls ensure to read the table correctly).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open
According to the table, you are nowhere near end of service life of the tapes.
I have still LTO4 in operation - but will be replaced in 2015 due space congestion in my robots.
If the capacity is OK for you and you have plenty of avaiable tapes, a continued use to use them should be OK Once vendors won't support LTO4 anymore - its time to replace for real.
Hope you can use the info
Best Regards
Nicolai