Tape cleaner drive arrangement for a tape library

A method comprising:

• providing a tape cartridge library possessing:
• a plurality of tape cartridges each containing a recording tape medium, a plurality of data transfer drives arranged to perform storage operations with the recording tape medium, at least one tape cleaning drive that is incapable of performing storage operations with the recording tape medium wherein the tape cleaning drive is entirely confined within the tape cartridge library;
• receiving a load instruction to load a first tape cartridge in a first data transfer drive;
• loading the first tape cartridge in the first data transfer drive;
• reading data retained on the first recording tape medium from the first tape cartridge via the first data transfer drive;
• determining that an excessive number of read errors occurred when reading the data;
• automatically loading the first tape cartridge in the at least one tape cleaning drive based on the determining step;
• cleaning the first recording tape medium via the tape cleaning drive.

A method comprising:

• providing a tape cartridge library possessing:
• a plurality of tape cartridges each containing a recording tape medium, a plurality of data transfer drives arranged to perform storage operations with the recording tape medium, at least one tape cleaning drive that is incapable of performing storage operations with the recording tape medium wherein the tape cleaning drive is entirely confined within the tape cartridge library;
• receiving a load instruction to load a first tape cartridge in a first data transfer drive;
• loading the first tape cartridge in the first data transfer drive;
• performing the storage operations to first recording tape medium from the first tape cartridge via the first data transfer drive;
• cleaning the first recording tape medium via the tape cleaning drive if a predetermined threshold of errors are reached when reading data from the first recording tape medium while performing the storage operations.