I worked for an LTO tape drive manufacturer for 20 years, and I never heard about this. I think something else was at play here, although I could be wrong. The drives are often used just as you did, although perhaps not always as intensively. Data is written to tapes, and they are shipped offsite. Basically, WORN (write once read never). The backups are for an absolute emergency, such as a 911 type event where a whole building comes down or a data center burns to the ground.
A few factors which may have influenced what you experienced:
* The quality of the tapes could be variable. In my experience, some branded tapes were significantly inferior to others.
* If the drive ran hot, then that may have contributed. IIRC, IBM's LTO-3 drive ran very hot.
* If you don't write data to the tape fast enough, it won't stream. It'll shoe-shine back and forth, as it runs out of data, repositions backwards on the tape, and resumes writing. I think this might affect the tape head life.
These were IBM drives in a QualStar XLS connected to systems running FileTek StorEdge. I don't remember if these were Fuji or Sony tapes, but I think Fuji, branded Fuji.
We did have shoeshining issues in testing, but increasing the amount of caching fixed that. Never heard of any throughput issues in production, but .. .edu so you know how well we monitored. That was a software issue anyway.
I think it was LTO5 era, but I don't rightly remember.
The IBM dude who handled all the hardware support would take a look at everything, nod, and replace the drive. I took him out for beer once and that's when he told me about the issues with the tapes. I left for greener pastures before that was solved, but it was going on for a good year.
Maybe he liked the food trucks outside the building, or maybe it was cheaper for them to replace the drives than actually help us fix the problem. Anyway, thanks for the insight! Glad I don't work on hardware anymore.
A few factors which may have influenced what you experienced:
* The quality of the tapes could be variable. In my experience, some branded tapes were significantly inferior to others.
* If the drive ran hot, then that may have contributed. IIRC, IBM's LTO-3 drive ran very hot.
* If you don't write data to the tape fast enough, it won't stream. It'll shoe-shine back and forth, as it runs out of data, repositions backwards on the tape, and resumes writing. I think this might affect the tape head life.