Recycling optical volumes

When you recycle an optical volume, OAM removes the objects from both sides of the optical platter. After OAM removes the objects from the optical platter, it recycles the optical volume using the parameters that are specified in the SETOPT OPTICALREINITMODE statement in the CBROAMxx member of PARMLIB. Specify the GROUP parameter to leave the volume in its current storage group, or specify the OAMSCRATCH parameter to reassign the volume as an OAM scratch volume.

You can reuse optical media, as follows:

OAM reformats the rewritable optical volume to reclaim the used space the next time that it is mounted on a drive. You can reuse the entire rewritable optical volume.
OAM does not reformat WORM optical volumes because the used space cannot be reclaimed. However, you can recycle WORM media and use the remaining available space on the media.

Example: In this example, SETOPT OPTICALREINITMODE(OAMSCRATCH) is specified in the CBROAMxx PARMLIB member. Suppose you have a WORM volume, VOL123, that is 67 percent full. VOL123 belongs to storage group GROUP01. After you recycle VOL123, all the objects are moved off of it and VOL123 is changed to a scratch volume. VOL123 is 100 percent empty, but it still has 33 percent of its original capacity available to write to. This recycled volume is available to any Object or Object Backup storage group that needs it. If this volume had been a rewritable optical volume, you could write to 100 percent of the original capacity.