Using damaged or worn out tape cartridges can be expensive. It could force you to recreate lost data, which can be extremely costly or even, in some situations, impossible. How do you know which cartridges should be retired? Happily, for users of LTO media there is a very reliable historical data source. That source is a cartridge memory chip (CM) inside the cartridge, and it contains a wealth of information about the past life of the cartridge.

This paper describes what information is available on the cartridge memory chip, what it means, how to access this chip, and how to make informed decisions based on this data.