Overview

Linear Tape-Open (or LTO) is a magnetic tape data storage technology originally developed in the late 1990s as an open standards alternative to the proprietary magnetic tape formats that were available at the time. Seagate, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM initiated the LTO Consortium, which directs development and manages licensing and certification of media and mechanism manufacturers. The standard form-factor of LTO technology goes by the name Ultrium, the original version of which was released in 2000 and could hold 100 GB of data in a single cartridge. The most recent version was released in 2010 and can hold 1.5 TB in the same size cartridge. Since 2002, LTO has been the best selling "super tape" format and is widely used with small and large computer systems, specially for backup.

Related Topics:

• HP
  • Drive Utility and Log Capture
• IBM
  • Drive Utility and Log Capture IBM LTO

LTO-2

• Doubled capacity and transfer speed
• Switched to PRML encoding
• First mechanisms approved in February 2003; first media approved in March 2003. 

LTO-3

• Doubled capacity and transfer speed again
• Introduced the WORM feature
• Doubled the number of write elements in the head
• First media approved in November 2004

LTO-4

• Doubled capacity again, to 800 GB
• Added 256-bit AES-GCM drive-level encryption
• Increased the data transfer rate
• First mechanisms approved in April 2007; first media approved in May 2007

LTO-5

The current draft has the following specifications:

• Capacity of 1.5 TB (1500 GB)
• Uncompressed data transfer rate of 140 MB/s

The specifications were announced pm January 19, 2010; the first LTO-5 drives appeared on the market in Q2, 2010.

 Resources

• "Linear Tape Open" Wikipedia, 10 November 2010, available from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Linear_Tape-Open. Internet; accessed November 2010.