IBM LTO 7 Tape Drive - Dust Sensors??

[RetroComputingGrotto]

I have a Quantum SuperLoader robotic tape library that uses an IBM LTO 7 tape drive which is constantly complaining that it needs cleaning. If you insert a cleaning tape, it performs the clean and resets the cleaning counter to 0 hours. It should only require cleaning every 50 or so working hours but after as little as just 1 hours use it requests cleaning. We've purchased a new cleaning tape along with new LTO backup tapes but that has not resolved the problem.

I have taken the library apart and can see no noticeable signs of dust inside. I have removed the tape drive from the library and then removed the cover so I can manually clean the read/write head with some IPA with a foam cleaning pad. Other than the cleaning hours counter, is there another way (i.e. some sort of dust sensor) that the tape drive uses to determine if it needs cleaning or not?

If it has 'dust sensors' what do they look like so I can clean them?



This is the tape drive just before I removed it from the robotic library:



As you can see there is a bit of dirt/grime on the top housing so I've removed/cleaned that with a lint free cloth.



Inbetween the rollers you can see the tiny read/write head which I have cleaned with a foam cleaning swab dipped in IPA.



Just need to work out now if there are actually any dust sensors and if so where they are so I can clean them before I put it back together.

[RetroComputingGrotto]

After cleaning the read/write head I removed this much dirt. Bearing in mind the drive has already been 'cleaned' with a cleaning cartridge this is quite a bit of dirt getting in the way of reading/writing.



I've never heard of a 'dust sensor' before that lots of people on other sites refer to so I'm going to assume it's the ill informed suffering from verbal diarrhea making uneducated guesses on something they know little about...

Only time will tell if this fixes the issue or not - I remember 'back in the day' cleaning this much/little dirt from the heads of a VHS recorder would improve the video quality no end so hopefully this is the fix 😎