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13th August 2009 10:11 GMT
Imation will soon be making the industry's first terabyte-plus raw capacity tape, in the LTO-5 format, with delivery in early 2010.
The Linear Tape Open (LTO) consortium has three technology-providing members: HP, IBM and Quantum. It defines tape formats against which the three members build drives and independent licensed manufacturers manufacture tape media and build drives. The current format is LTO-4, with a raw capacity of 800GB.
The LTO development roadmap has LTO-5 as its next format and this is what Imation is now licensed to manufacture. Its raw capacity is twice LTO-4's, 1.6TB, with a 2:1 compressed capacity of 3.2TB. LTO-3, the prior generation and format to LTO-4, had a capacity of 400GB raw and and an 80MB/sec transfer speed. The transfer speed rose to 120MB/sec with LTO-4 and will rise again to 180MB/sec with LTO-5.
The LTO website above quotes such figures in compressed data form and so says LTO-5 capacity and transfer rates are 3.2TB and 360MB/sec respectively.
Imation expects to deliver LTO-5 tape media in early 2010 and will, logically, have been developing the media using pre-production versions of LTO-5 drives. These drives will support WORM (Write Once Read Many) format for archiving of unalterable data on tape, and also encryption to secure the contents against unauthorised access. They will also probably support the reading of LTO-4 format tapes and so provide an upgrade path to LTO-4 users needing more capacity.