What's the best LTO-3 cleaning frequency?

[em23]

As of today, my four drives have a mount time of over 100. Frequecny is N/A and Last Cleaned shows nothing. I thought I had set it in the Admin Console to clean after 60 mounts, but it doesn't appear to be cleaning them. And yes, I do have cleaning tapes in robot.

What's best practice for cleaning drives? Should these be cleaned after 100 mounts or less?

[zippy]

 Cleaning a tape drive to many times  wil strip the heads on the tapes drive.

I think they created cleanig tapes so you can damage you tape drive faster!!  So the they can sell more.

JMO 

Once a year should be good

JD

[DavidParker]

If your library and drives support it, just use the Tape Alert notifications.
The drive will tell you itself when it needs cleaning.

Definitely do no clean them too often though!
60 mounts is much too frequent.

[Darren_Dunham]

Here's an HP document on cleaning their drives.  I'm sure some of the items hold for IBM drives as well.

www.sundds-lto.com/uploadLinks/LTO%20cleaning%20white%20paper_rev3.1.pdf

--
Darren

[Yasuhisa_Ishika]

LTO drives today will work hundreds / thousands of hours without cleaning.
Cleanings based on TapeAlert will work fine, but I usually set 500 hours as cleaning frequency for  prevention.

[Nicolai]

The LTO range of tape drives has cleaning brushes installed that wipe the R/W head before each mount, that has reduced the need for cleaning tapes dramatic compared to drives without. 

Tapealert didn't work in my site, so we set up cleaning to 1 time per month (that at least 360 hours of operation).

Regards

Nicolai