Patent ID: 8009539

Claim:
A method for monitoring and analyzing the storage media quality and the drive hardware performance of a media library, the media library comprising: a plurality of removable storage media, a plurality of drive units for said storage media and means for moving said storage media to and from appropriate drive units; wherein said media library is managed by a management system being connected to said media library; said method comprising the steps of: using at least one reference medium of a known and proven quality to compare the performance of at least one of said storage media in a given drive unit with the performance of said reference medium in said given drive unit; and testing the performance of at least one given drive unit of said media library when acting on said reference medium, wherein each of said storage and reference media and each of said drive units provide statistical and error information for each operation performed on one of said storage and reference media, and wherein the quality of a given storage medium and the performance of a given drive unit are determined on the basis of said statistical and error information, and wherein said error information is analyzed classify the corresponding error and to identify said error either as drive hardware error or as media error or as none of them, if possible, wherein the statistical and error information stored for each of said storage and reference media comprises: a number of mounts, a total number of data read and written, a list of drive units associated with the last x mounts, and a number and class of errors.