Percentage used endurance indicator too short on HP

[roschwald]

On a HP Ultrium LTO4 (HP StorageWorks Ultrium 1760 SAS) drive, I receive this message and an exitcode of 4. Is this a bug?

"Percentage used endurance indicator too short (pl=6)"

Running on CentOS6 6.5 x86_64. Used the standard smartmoontools of CentOS and also self-compiled smartmontools 6.2. All the same.

./smartctl -H -l error /dev/sg6
smartctl 6.2 2013-07-26 r3841 [x86_64-linux-2.6.32-431.3.1.el6.x86_64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-13, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
TapeAlert: OK
Percentage used endurance indicator too short (pl=6)
Error counter log:
           Errors Corrected by           Total   Correction     Gigabytes    Total
               ECC          rereads/    errors   algorithm      processed    uncorrected
           fast | delayed   rewrites  corrected  invocations   [10^9 bytes]  errors
read:        194        0         0         0        194          0.000           0
write:     77270       14        14        14     115211          0.000           0

# echo $?
4

# dmesg | grep Sequential

scsi 2:0:0:0: Sequential-Access HP       Ultrium 4-SCSI   U24D PQ: 0 ANSI: 5

# tapeinfo -f /dev/sg6
Product Type: Tape Drive
Vendor ID: 'HP      '
Product ID: 'Ultrium 4-SCSI  '
Revision: 'U24D'
Attached Changer API: No
SerialNumber: 'HU18383B6D'
MinBlock: 1
MaxBlock: 16777215
SCSI ID: 0
SCSI LUN: 0
Ready: yes
BufferedMode: yes
Medium Type: Not Loaded
Density Code: 0x46
BlockSize: 0
DataCompEnabled: yes
DataCompCapable: yes
DataDeCompEnabled: yes
CompType: 0x1
DeCompType: 0x1
BOP: yes
Block Position: 0
Partition 0 Remaining Kbytes: 800226
Partition 0 Size in Kbytes: 800226
ActivePartition: 0
EarlyWarningSize: 0
NumPartitions: 0
MaxPartitions: 0

./smartctl -a /dev/sg6
smartctl 6.2 2013-07-26 r3841 [x86_64-linux-2.6.32-431.3.1.el6.x86_64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-13, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Vendor:               HP
Product:              Ultrium 4-SCSI
Revision:             U24D
LU provisioning type reserved [7], LBPRZ=1
Rotation Rate:        18517 rpm
Logical Unit id:      0x500110a001037cf2
Serial number:        HU18383B6D
Device type:          tape
Transport protocol:   SAS
Local Time is:        Wed Jan 29 10:06:34 2014 CET
Temperature Warning:  Disabled or Not Supported

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
TapeAlert Supported
TapeAlert: OK
Percentage used endurance indicator too short (pl=6)
Current Drive Temperature:     36 C
Drive Trip Temperature:        255 C

Error counter log:
           Errors Corrected by           Total   Correction     Gigabytes    Total
               ECC          rereads/    errors   algorithm      processed    uncorrected
           fast | delayed   rewrites  corrected  invocations   [10^9 bytes]  errors
read:          0        0         0         0          0          0.000           0
write:         0        0         0         0          0          0.000           0

Device does not support Self Test logging

[Christian Franke]

r4189.