Yesterday, Imation announced that they are the first licensed manufacturer to start producing LTO-5 tapes. LTO-5 is the successor of the current LTO-4 tape standard, doubling raw capacity from 800 to 1600 GB. Transfer speeds are up as well, improving slightly from 120 to 180 MB/second.
LTO4 tape cartridge
The company is the first to obtain a license to produce these tapes from the LTO Technology Provider Companies (HP, IBM and Quantum). There’s no word on the actual availability of drives to read these tapes; no specific models have been announced yet. Still, Imation expects to ship the first tape cartridges in early 2010, so they obviously expect to have actual customers for these within a couple of months.
The LTO-5 standard is widely expected to be the last high-capacity tape standard; upgrades to the LTO format have historically taken two to three years to finalize, and by 2012 or 2013 hard drives and SSD’s are generally expected to have capacities and price points that make tape drives obsolete for most users. LTO-6 is still on the official roadmap of the LTO consortium, but I don’t expect it to be completed any time soon.
For those interested in alternatives to the LTO tapes, The Register notes that both Sun and IBM, the latter of which is a member of the LTO consortium, offer 1TB tape drives for their high-end servers:
Mainframe tape drive and media users have access to 1TB tapes from IBM, 3592 media with the TS1130 drive, and Sun/StorageTek, with its T10000B media and drive. Mainframe customers are told that LTO tape is unsuitable for them because it is designed for less intensive use-cycles than the IBM and Sun/StorageTek mainframe-specific tape products.
IBM TS1130 tape drive
Related posts:
Your RSS reader
Daily e-mail
Twitter
