I bought a New Old Stock Dell IBM LTO-5 external tape drive from eBay 6 months ago. Up until 2 weeks ago it was working great. Now I can only write 1TB to 1.5TB Tapes at reduced speed and after a writing full tape it throws up error A on the SCD.According to the manual A means "Degraded Operation". But I'm not getting media or head errors. So what would that mean?
I have used a cleaning tape twice and cleaned the head manually with Isopropyl and cotton tips while being careful to not apply too much force or get any lint get caught in the head. The head looks in pristine condition as far as I know what they're supposed to look like.
I have run "Test Head" and "Test cartridge & media" tests and both pass. But it fails the "Write Performance" Test at 66MB/s instead of the 110/120MB/s I used to get.Using the IBM Diagnostic Software.
The only...