Cleaning cartridge
A specially labeled IBM® LTO Ultrium Cleaning Cartridge is used to clean the drive head.
The drive itself determines when a head must be cleaned. It alerts you when the
single-character display (SCD) flashes a
. To clean the head manually, insert a cleaning cartridge into the tape
load compartment. See Figure 1. The drive
completes the cleaning automatically. When the cleaning is finished, the drive ejects the
cartridge, and the SCD is blank.

Note: The drive automatically ejects an expired
cleaning cartridge without running the cleaning process. Replace the expired
cleaning cartridge with a new cleaning cartridge and insert it into the drive.
The IBM cleaning cartridges are valid for 50 uses. The cartridge's LTO-CM chip tracks the number of times that the cartridge is used.
Important: After 50 uses, the cleaning cartridge
expires. It is no longer usable, and must be replaced