Question : Problem: Tape drive error

I wish I could assign more than 500 points to this question because as far as I can tell it is impossible.  I have a seagate stt3401a tape drive and I'm using Travan 40/20 tapes.  This worked fine for a couple of years.  About 6 months ago I started getting critical read write errors in my backup logs and the job would abort.  Since then I have replaced the tape drive, gotten a cleaning cartridge and cleaned the tape drive, gotten 2 new batches of tapes (thinking the first one might be faulty,)retensioned the tapes, formatted the tapes, reinstalled tapeware, reinstalled tape drive drivers, tried backing up with nt backup instead of tapeware - all to no avail.  Here's a small sample of the log:
 benefit packages 2004.xls : Ver : 517 - Hardware failure
   benefit packages 2005 for board. : Ver : 517 - Hardware failure
          benefit packages 2005.xls : Ver : 517 - Hardware failure
   christ lutheran salary split hea : Ver : 517 - Hardware failure
   christ lutheran salary split hea : Ver : 517 - Hardware failure
                 MissyThompson2.xls : Ver : 517 - Hardware failure
There's an alert in tapeware and this says: faulty drive or media

Every once in a while it will run without errors.  It doesn't matter what tape is in.  Does anyone have any idea what could be going on?

Answer : Problem: Tape drive error

If you replaced the drive and the tapes you might consider the controller card that controls the tape drive as that is the next piece of hardware i would suspect. Also you might consider using an external hard drive to back up to as replacing tapes can get rather costly and you could always get 2 hard drives and keep one offsite and swap them out every day or once a week depending on how mission critical each days work is.