QuickSpecs
HP StorageWorks Ultrium Half-Height Tape Drives
Product Highlights
LTO Ultrium | Linear |
Technology | and Certance (now Quantum) - who brought together their combined expertise in tape technology |
| to develop an entirely new format based on the best of existing technologies. Because LTO |
| Ultrium technology was a new format, it required no cumbersome support of legacy formats, so it |
| could be designed without compromising on reliability or performance. The LTO Program, a |
| consortium of the three technology provider companies, has developed a |
| generation roadmap, which has been executed right on schedule, with the first generation of |
| Ultrium drives and media released in 2000, the second generation in 2002, and the third |
| generation in 2004. |
| Ultrium 1 tape drive technology uses a linear format of 384 tracks, writing eight tracks |
| simultaneously. Ultrium 2 tape drive technology uses a linear format of 512 tracks, writing eight |
| tracks simultaneously. The data is written in a serpentine pattern; the tape reverses direction after |
| each set of eight tracks is written. This provides higher density recording, enabling customers to |
| lower costs and increase efficiency by storing more data on a single tape in an industry standard |
| format. |
| The LTO standard for backward compatibility is to write back one generation and read back two |
| generations; therefore: |
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| LTO 1 and LTO 2 media. |
| |
| LTO 3 media and also read LTO 1 media. |
| As part of the LTO open standard, all HP tape drives and media offer the same standards of |
| compatibility with tape drives and media manufactured by other LTO vendors. |
| LTO data compression |
| Compression (ALDC) hardware compression. Compression is automatically turned off if the |
| compressed data would cause an overall expansion in data size, hence optimizing the available |
| capacity on the media. This system is used in Ultrium generation 1, 2, and 3 products. |
| The decision about what next technology you should buy into should be based on your future, not |
| your past, investment. Choose the Ultrium format when you need the following advantages: |
| Maximum reliability, capacity and performance |
| Compatibility with a broad range of operating systems and servers (e.g., a mixed system |
| environment) |
| A |
| technologies without any compromises for backward compatibility requirements |
| A solid roadmap for future generations of the technology |
| An open format available from multiple vendors |
| Lowest media cost of any 'superdrive' tape technology |
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Data Rate Matching | An exclusive feature of HP Ultrium tape drives, data rate matching allows the tape drive to adjust |
| its transfer rate to the speed of host dynamically and continuously. This feature, coupled with the |
| Ultrium buffer management technology within the data path, ensures that the tape drive continues |
| to stream data, reducing the need to rewind the tape back and forth to wait for the host. This |
| feature brings two big advantages: |
| It optimizes performance, getting the best performance possible for the environment, |
| regardless of the speed of the host or the network. |
| It reduces wear and tear on drive and media, thus increasing reliability. |
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DA - 12128 Worldwide QuickSpecs — Version 7 — 3/17/2006 | Page 5 |