LTO8 Ultrium Tape Drives

LTO 8 tape drives are the latest generation of LTO Ultrium tape drives since its release to the market nearly 20 years ago with the LTO Ultrium 1 drive and media. LTO stands for Linear Tape Open and as its name suggests it is an open technology where many brands are licenced to produce the drives, the tape cartridges or both. These drive manufacturers include HP now HPE, Quantum, IBM who are the owners of the technology through the LTO Consortium. Other companies producing drives are Dell and Spectra Logic. Companies producing tape only are the tape media manufacturer Fujifilm. The LTO 8 tape cartridge specifications are impressive, as it stores up to 12 TB native or uncompressed capacity at speeds of up to 360MB/sec, and up to 30 TB of compressed data at speeds up to 900MB/sec. That is a transfer rate of up to 1.38 TB per hour for native/uncompressed data or up to 3.24 TB per hour for compressed data making it a high performance tape storage system. The LTO 8 tape continues the use of Barium Ferrite (BaFe) particles which improves reliability, longevity and density. The LTO Ultrium 8 tape drive is available in three forms; as an external desktop stand alone drive, as an internal drive for servers and as a drive installed in an autoloader or tape library. The LTO Ultrium 8 tape drive can connect through three communication methods; SAS or Serial Attached SCSI, FC or Fibre Channel and for some drives Thunderbolt 3 for Apple PC users. The LTO 8 Ultrium tape drives can read or write to LTO 8 tape cartridges, can read or write to LTO 7 M8 or LTO 7 Type M tape cartridges, and can read or write to LTO 7 tape cartridges, allowing customers storage capacity of 6 TB up to 30 TB from one tape in the same tape drive. The LTO 8 data cartridge offers the LTFS or the Linear Tape File System in addition to being able to be used by archive and backup software driven storage. Other products include LTO8 WORM Write Once Read Many media for archives and backups which must not be changed or for long term version storage, and the LTO Universal cleaning cartridge which will clean all generations of LTO tape drives from 1 to 8.