>A CE friend of mine and I discussed this issue and he contends that the tapes >come from the manufacturing process dirty and actually become cleaner with use. Thanks for that input, George. If tape == clean, then drive == dirty. We recently received 120 K tapes and, as was the experience with others, about six of them got I/O errors during labeling, on random drives. I decided to try them again, and the labeled fine, which surely points to tape irregularities. This kind of quality from Imation is discouraging - a great departure from the quality we need and have gotten in the past. When such tape is manufactured, it should be polished to remove any roughness and irregularities. It is the case that any magnetic media evidences something of a bell curve for recording quality, as the surface is inherently polished and smoothed during use, delivers better recordings, and then deteriorates after a lot more use wears down the surface. (This is visible with video tape.) Of course, in the case of critical applications like dense data recording, the tape should come prepped from the manufacturer... the "polishing" should not occur during attempts to record business data. Richard Sims, BU
