Wednesday, November 9, 2011

LTO Tape Drives – Terabytes on your desktop?

With a dizzying array of formats for tape drives, it can be daunting for business or home users to decide on the right backup solution for his or her business. After you search on-line for tape drives, you may see esoteric names like AIT, Mammoth, VXA, Data8, 8mm, DDS, DAT, 4mm, SLR, QIC, Ditto, SAIT, Travan, Magstar, DLT, SDLT, ADR, TX-2, and therefore the list goes on! No wonder why it is thus so confusing for people to decide when considering information storage backup solutions.

One widespread format adopted by several corporations, is the LTO format or standard. LTO stands for Linear Tape Open. LTO technology utilizes a magnetic tape cartridge that is four inches square cartridge and has a thickness of half an inch thick. There are 3 firms that started the LTO Consortium: HP, IBM, and Certance (was Seagate and now is Quantum).

In the earlier days of tape storage throughout the mid Eighties, the DLT format was the de-facto half inch cartridge standard in the market. Then the LTO format was released in an effort to displace the present DLT format. The similarity of size and form factor of the new LTO half-inch cartridges makes it easier for users of robotic tape libraries to migrate from DLT to LTO libraries.

LTO Ultrium is often used for the name of this open format technology since every generation will increase its native storage capability. LTO-1 has 100GB, LTO-2 has 200GB, LTO-3 jumps up to 400GB, LTO-4 has 800GB, and LTO-5 has 1500GB (1.5 Terabytes). Do you know what a Terabyte is?

New options are being added with every generation. The new LTO-4 and LTO-5 have encryption capabilities so tape cartridges have the info on them safely locked from intrusion by using Advanced Encryption which is  called AES Encryption methodology 256 bit. Starting with LTO-5, the fifth generation, there’s currently partitioning. By dividing up the LTFS (Linear Tape File System) into totally different partitions, this permits faster access times and additionally improved information management.

Future generations of LTO will keep increasing the storage capacity. One day, one cartridge can hold multiple TERABYTES of information.

Related LTO Brands
HP Hewlett Packard
IBM
Compaq
Dell
Quantum
Imation
Tandberg Data
Sun Microsystems

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