HP Dat 72 USB Internal Tape Drive

Nathan Simon — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 03:58:06 +0000

I had a tape drive at a client slowly die, I was running Symantec Backup Exec 12d. I spent an hour or so troubleshooting and ended up calling HP tech support and they decided to replace the tape drive, soon after, the replacement tape drive died…. it was in there for about one week. I tried everything. I was using HP Tape Tools for Windows. I updated the firmware for the tape drive and this didn’t help. I updated the drivers and it didn’t help. Diagnostics was pointing to the tape drive needing a cleaning(this was after many diagnostic runs), although the drive is a week old. I didn’t believe HP when they said we needed a cleaning tape. Why would a tape drive work, but slowly? it was much faster with compression, but always would come back with a CRC error. In the end, I ordered two cleaning tapes, a few days later, I went onsite and ran the cleaning tape… to my surprise this seemed to fix the issue…. my question to HP is, “Why wasn’t this drive quality tested?” Another question is, “Why doesn’t a drive that requires cleaning monthly, ship with a cleaning tape?!!?”

Half ranting, half informative… If I save just one person hours of troubleshooting, then my job is done…

The Real (and Virtual) Adventures of Nathan the IT Guy » poor tape drive performance

HP Dat 72 USB Internal Tape Drive