Sounds a lot like what I was seeing when we got our "new to us" 3590E1A drives.
The problem was the microcode level. It was way behind and caused all kinds of grief. 2/3 of our new tapes were unlabelable. The drive would load the tape and spin for ever until it timed out. Once the microcode/firmware was upgraded, problems went away. Went back and relabeled tapes that previously were unlabelable. Thomas Denier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent by: "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 03/03/2003 03:30 PM Please respond to "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] cc: Subject: Errors on 3590 K tapes We are running a 4.2.3.2 TSM server under OS/390. We have four 3590 tape drives that were and are working well with 3590 J tapes (the ones with 20 GB capacity without compression). We are in the process of migrating our onsite storage pools to 3590 K tapes (the ones with 40 GB capacity without compression). So far we have had seven of the new tapes forced read-only because of I/O errors. We have one full 3590 K tape, and seventeen in 'FILLING' status that have not so far had any I/O errors. The errors have been spread across at least three of the tape drives. In most cases, there is an OS/390 message like the following: IOS071I 0C62,1D,ADSM, MISSING CHANNEL AND DEVICE END and a TSM message like the following: ANR5351E Error reading BlockID on device 0C62. Do 3590 K tapes typically suffer the kind of infant mortality rate we are seeing?