#11 Tapeinfo: Medium Auxiliary Memory support.

[stoatwblr]

The ability to read and report "medium auxiliary memory" would be extremely useful.

This is also called LTO chip memory, but far more widespread than that.

"IBM TotalStorage LTO Ultrium Tape Drive" scsi reference (IBM publication GA32-0928-02) goes into a lot of detail about accessing the MAM. There's also an (incomplete) standalone lto-cm project at https://github.com/scangeo/lto-cm which might be of some use.

The usefulness comes from this factor: The MAM contains a lot of information about tape health, which means that advance warning of failure conditions can be given and it's specific to the tape that it's a part of, rather than the drive.

All LTO drives have a MAM reader onboard. Accessing it is a matter of the right commands. Some changers do too.

Thanks