tape drive goes bad

[bheisser]

I am running Brightstore 11 on w2k
I have an issue where I have 4 40/80 dlt tape drives in an external cage/chasis.
drives 1 and 2 are on 1 scsi card, drives 3 and 4 are on another.
drive 3 will be fine then after a couple days it will get terrible throughput and eventually fail. if i move it to another slot it does not fix anything when I replace it the scenario repeats
any ideas on what is causing this i have replaced this drive numerous times, no problems with the other 3 drives

thanks

 

[davidmichel]

It makes no sense to me that a tape drive will have poor through put after three days.

So if drive 3 is put is swapped with drive 2 does the problem follow drive 3 or stay with the drive bay?
Have you tried backing up different data to this drive?
perhaps it is related to the target system.

 

[bheisser]

it seems to be bay 3 goes bad, if i move the drive after it goes bad it stays bad. if i take a drive from 2 and move it to three it will go bad

 

[davidmichel]

Ok so if the problem is specific to drive bay 3, then there is a problem with the library.

There is a very good chance it is related to the cable &/or connector for drive bay # 3.