Internal LTO tape drive becomes hot

Posted by claasz on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by claasz
Published on 2012-06-22T07:27:39Z Indexed on 2012/06/22 9:18 UTC
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Filed under:

linux

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Hardware

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tape

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tapedrive

We use an internal LTO3 tape drive (HP Ultrium 920) in a PC (no particular server hardware) running Linux. The tape drive becomes quite hot - I don't have the exact temperature, but you may touch it for a second or two, then it hurts ;-) This happens when the tape has nothing to do (during reading/writing, it might become even hotter, I haven't checked that).

Besides that, the system is working fine. Now I'm wondering

Why does the tape becomes so hot?
Is this something I need to care about?
Is there something like a 'standby' mode for the tape? (I think it should not consume that much energy when it is not used)

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