LTO-6 External Tape Drive

The LTO-6 External Tape Drive offers a massive 2.5TB of uncompressed or 6.25TB of compressed data to be stored on a single magenetic tape. Considering this tape has a storage life, if kept in the right conditions, of 15-30 years, those looking to back up and store critical data should look no further.

Speed is also impressive with read/write speeds of up to 160 Megabytes per second (MB/s) possible, meaning an uncompressed tape containg 2.5TB of data can be processed in as little as 4.5 hours. Yes, slow when compared to hard disk, optical and flash type media but those don’t even come close when comparing long term data retention and compared to other tape systems, 160MB/s is blisteringly fast.

Like all LTO technologies, the LTO-6 External Tape Drive utilises an RFID system to simplify tape identification and media management. The RFID tag integrated into each tape can be written with various information regarding the tape and the data it contains.

The LTO-6 External Tape Drive is also backwards read compatible with LTO-4 and LTO-5 tapes and will offer a speed advantage when recovering data written by those types when compared to native LTO-4 and LTO-5 hardware.

Connectivity is via Serial Attached SCSI (SAS). Hire Intelligence provides the LTO-6 External Tape Drive for rent along with the required SAS cables but can also supply suitable PCI-X or PCI Express Host Bus Adapters to suit those users whose hardware does not have a suitable connection already.