LTO

LTO (Linear Tape-open) is a magnetic tape data storage technology developed by Seagate, HP, and IBM as an alternative to Quantum's proprietary Digital Linear Tape (DLT). In the late 1990s, DLT and Sony's “Advanced Intelligent Tape” (AIT) were the leading options for high capacity, high speed tape storage.

Capacities are often stated on LTO tapes as double the actual value; they assume that data will be compressed with a 2:1 ratio. Every LTO cartridge has a Cartridge Memory chip inside it, which is used to identify tapes and help drives discriminate between the different generations of the technology. The average tape seek/filemark search time is 75 seconds. LTO tapes contain a strong error correction algorithm, and when data is written to the tape, it is verified by reading it back using the read heads positioned just 'behind' the write heads.

See the accompanying image for storage capacity and speed for each generation of LTO.

Estimated tape durability

1.2 million passes (NOTE: many passes are required to fill up a tape)
30 years of archival storage
20,000 loads and unloads

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License found at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html. It uses material from the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open.

Click on the image above to see a chart describing storage capacity and speed for each generation of LTO.