LTO 3 tape drives arrive

The latest tape drives offer new options for archiving

The first tape drives based on the LTO 3 standard are shipping, designed to boost capacity and performance, and keep firms away from disk storage options.

Certance, formerly known as Seagate Removable Storage Solutions, is first to offer Linear Tape Open (LTO) 3 drives, in its CL 800 range.

The third generation of the drives offers double the capacity of the previous generation, up to 400GB, or 800GB when compressed. It also offers faster backup of up to 490GB per hour and the ability to read LTO 1 and 2 tapes, said the firm.

Internal, desktop and rack-mounted drives cost around £4,000, about 50 percent more than LTO 2 drives.

Certance will provide support for write-once-read-many (Worm) capabilities with a firmware upgrade later this year to help firms comply with data protection rules.

The continuing capacity and price-performance improvements of tape are helping it compete with disk storage offerings, increasingly used for backup tasks.

"In terms of cost and capacity, tapes are still unrivalled, and they offer a lifespan of about 30 years," said Certance sales manager Nick Powling. "Disk drives are used as a staging area but for backup across multiple arrays and spindles, the best type of removable storage is tape."

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