IBM said its TotalStorage LTO Ultrium 2 Tape Drive 3580 store 200GB of raw data on one tape cartridge, and can transfer uncompressed data between buffer and tape at up to 35Mbytes/sec, compared to what it said is 30MBytes/sec for HP’s equivalent drive. But the company admitted that data throughput can vary according to application, and that its figure is based on the results of internally defined tests.
LTO 2 is the latest generation of the tape standard jointly developed by IBM, HP and Seagate Technologies LLC. HP said that last month OEM customers such as Storage Technology Corp began shipping tape libraries that include HP drives based on the LTO 2 standard. Seagate has yet to ship any hardware supporting LTO 2, and this week declined to say when it would do so.
The major competitor to LTO is the SDLT standard developed by Quantum Corp. LTO and SDLT are in the process of leapfrogging each other in terms of performance, and LTO 2 now holds the lead.
The current fastest SDLT drive is the SDLT 320 which offers a maximum throughput of around 16MBytes/sec and a capacity of 160GB per cartridge. Quantum has promised that this summer it will ship an SDLT 600 drive with 30MBytes/sec throughput and 300GB per cartridge capacity.
IBM said that Dell and ADIC have qualified its 3580 drive, and that IBM itself is shipping the drives for use in all of its servers, and in its largest tape library, the 3584.
Source: Computerwire
