Skip to Main Content
IBM System Storage Ideas Portal


This portal is to open public enhancement requests against IBM System Storage products. To view all of your ideas submitted to IBM, create and manage groups of Ideas, or create an idea explicitly set to be either visible by all (public) or visible only to you and IBM (private), use the IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com).


Shape the future of IBM!

We invite you to shape the future of IBM, including product roadmaps, by submitting ideas that matter to you the most. Here's how it works:

Search existing ideas

Start by searching and reviewing ideas and requests to enhance a product or service. Take a look at ideas others have posted, and add a comment, vote, or subscribe to updates on them if they matter to you. If you can't find what you are looking for,

Post your ideas
  1. Post an idea.

  2. Get feedback from the IBM team and other customers to refine your idea.

  3. Follow the idea through the IBM Ideas process.


Specific links you will want to bookmark for future use

Welcome to the IBM Ideas Portal (https://www.ibm.com/ideas) - Use this site to find out additional information and details about the IBM Ideas process and statuses.

IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com) - Use this site to view all of your ideas, create new ideas for any IBM product, or search for ideas across all of IBM.

ideasibm@us.ibm.com - Use this email to suggest enhancements to the Ideas process or request help from IBM for submitting your Ideas.

Status Under review
Created by Guest
Created on Sep 25, 2024
Merged idea
This idea has been merged into another idea. To comment or vote on this idea, please visit SPA-I-39 Avoid to damage good tape media by bad drive.

On tape read or write fail, before marking tape bad, verify this isn't likely due to a tape drive or library issue Merged

When a tape drive has hardware issues, spectrum archive will keep trying to use it to read or write tapes and then mark those tapes as need_replace or require_replace. Often there is nothing wrong with the tapes, but the tape drive was in a bad state (and may have been subsequently replaced).

Consider more safety around bad tape drives or library state driving dozens of tapes into invalid state unnecessarily.

Potential ideas:

If a tape read/write/mount fails, requeue it to a separate drive. Only when it fails in a different drive mark the tape bad (similar to ts4500 media verification logic).

On a threshold of tape read/write/mount fails, check status and details from drive and consider disabling tape drive to avoid further failures. Threshold could be number of separate tapes having failures in one hour, or on each failure, or some other trigger.

Idea priority Medium