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actidata actiTape LTO Drives
The development of LTO®
LTO®, Linear Tape Open, is a specification for magnetic tapes and the appropriate tape drives. Thanks to the LTO® Ultrium format, there is a consistent tape technology for data storage on the market now.
This technology was developped by three big companies (IBM, HP, Certance) as a collaborative project. A further feature is the steady process of development: The product is improved at regular intervals and in this way the technology is able to meet the users' increasing requirements by permanently enhancing the capacity and performance and extending the technology.
In the year 2000 the first LTO® generation had got a capacity of 200 GB and a performance of 40 MB/s. Today, nearly 10 years later, the latest generation is equipped with a 1500 % higher capacity (3 TB) and it is nearly 7 times faster than the first generation (280 MB/s). Time will show, where this road will lead in the future and which capacity limit will be achieved in the current decade. The ambitious target for LTO®-6 expecting a capacity of 8 TB (5 TB higher than LTO®-5) and a much higher performance (525 MB/s) shows that the development is far from being completed.
Not just improved performance, but also a lot of new opportunities
Since LTO®-3 every new LTO® generation launching has also introduced a brand new technology.
- LTO®-3 2004: Companies like the energy company Enron or Worldcom have become insolvent due to accounting frauds and stock market scandals and have ruinated many investors. Especially in the USA many people wondered why such big enterprises are able to do what ever they want. Thanks to different legal regulations (e.g. Sabanes-Oxley Act of 2002) companies should perform more transparently. These arrangements defined, that deleting, overwriting or changing certain corporate data is prohibited. This is why the WORM technology (write once, read many) was introduced, the write-protection is integrated in the firmware of the drive and will be activated by the characteristics of the appropriate tape.
- LTO®-4 2007: Since this generation the tapes can be codified independently from the manufacturer with the help of the AES algorithm with 256 bit key. With this technology it is possible to decide which areas of the data recording on the tape should be encrypted.
- LTO®-5 2010: With the current generation the LTFS technology (linear Tape File System) was introduced, now the customers are allowed to use the drive easily as an external HDD hard disk. Because of the numerous new opportunities, we dedicated a whole website to the LTFS technology.