We have problems with bad drive heads of DLT7000-drives in our Backup Roboter (Storagetek L700). Regulary about all 2 months one of our Driveheads get defective.

Netapp recommends us to power off the filer, replace the drive, and then power on the filer. We don´t like this way, because we have many CIFS-User on that Filer, who will loose their connection in the case of a reboot.

My question is how you handle replacing of drives in a library. Do you power the filer down, or do you replace the drive without powering the filer down (if you do so, how???)

Our configuration is like follows: F760 Filer with 2 DLT 7000 (Part of an STK L700 Library). Both drives are connected to the filer with one "Fast Wide Differential - SCSI-Interface". The library supports swapping of drives without powering it down.

regards, Klaus Micheler Infineon DC Austria