Media Services
Optical Media Cleaning
Optical media is generally worry-free and since its inception, has been the media of choice for long-term archival storage. The media is extremely stable and unlike other archiving mediums, is not susceptible to magnetic interference, heat, humidity, water, EMP or solar flares, hardware failures, pollution, deletion, power surges, warping, active viruses and hackers. Additionally, optical media does not require special handling and can be stored offsite without the need for special environmental conditions.
Media does on occasion require cleaning as it can become contaminated by airborne particles or other elements depending upon environment. That is when Media Cleaning Services are needed. There are many reasons to keep media cleaned on a regular basis as follows:
- Increase media efficiency - Media cleaning is a very important factor of system performance that is often over-looked by customers. This is due to multiple retries of the system hardware which recover many errors and appear transparent to the user. However, this is an essential part of proper system performance, reduction of errors and media efficiency.
- How? A small particle of debris the size of a pen point, can cause many read / write errors, impact drive performance, cause a loss in media capacity, and in some cases cause failure to recover customer data. Debris can migrate to other areas of the media surface as well as to the optical lens of the drive. With proper media maintenance severe problems can be prevented.
- Why? Media surface contamination can be caused by many sources and is largely dependent on the environmental conditions of where the system hardware is located. Printers and scanners are a large contributor to contamination and should not be located in the same room as optical disk drives. A clean computer room with filtered air can greatly extend the time between cleanings.
- Interval - Media cleaning should be performed on a regular basis. To determine the proper interval start with a clean piece of media, note the date and the media serial number, insert media into system, then inspect the media every two weeks for surface contamination. When significant contamination is seen on the media surfaces note the date. The time between the start date and end date is the period in which media cleaning should be scheduled.
Alliance Storage Technologies, Inc. (ASTI) offers professional media cleaning service at your site, or at the ASTI technical lab where media is cleaned by factory trained, experienced media technicians. Media Cleaning is available for all UDO, MO, and 12 inch Optical Data Storage Media.
Click here to download the Optical Media Cleaning brochure.
Contact ASTI Sales: 719-593-7900 or submit a Request for Quote.
Media Analysis & Recovery Service
ASTI will perform analysis on the suspect media to determine if the media is defective and whether customer data can be recovered. If data recovery is possible, ASTI will copy all readable data from the defective media to a new piece of media.
Contact technical support for Media Analysis and Recovery
drive cleaning annually as preventive maintenance. To simplify the cleaning process, ASTI has developed a Drive Cleaning Cartridge.
