IBM Introduces Half-Height LTO 3 Tape Drive

July 17, 2007 Alex Woodie

IBM last week announced a new half-height Linear Tape Open (LTO) 3 Ultrium drives, the IBM System Storage TS2230, which connects to System i servers, among other servers.

The TS2230, which carries a list price of $3,645 and becomes available August 3, can be used in a stand-alone or mounted in an industry-standard 19-inch rack. It supports serial-attached SCSI (SAS) or low-voltage differential SCSI attachments to i5/OS, AIX, Unix, Linux, and Windows servers.

Due to its smaller size, the TS2230 offers slightly slower data transfer rates than other LTO 3 gear–60 MB/sec, compared to the spec’s native 80 MB/sec top end. However, the TS2230 offers the full 400 GB of native capacity, or 800GB with 2:1 compression, that other LTO 3 gear enjoy. The TS2230 drive can read and write LTO 2 cartridges, and can read LTO 1 cartridges.

IBM first shipped LTO 3 drives in late 2004 when it introduced its first 3580 LTO 3 drive, and followed that up in early 2005 with a wide array of specialty LTO 3 drives, autoloaders, libraries, and media.

IBM shipped its first LTO 4 drives, which offer 800 GB of native capacity per cartridge and data transfer rates up to 120 MB per second, in May. The TS2340 supports SCSI connections and carries a suggested price of $5,170, while the TS1040 attaches via Fibre Channel and carries a price tag of $22,800.

For more information on the new TS2230 half-height LTO 3 tape drive, see IBM hardware announcement 107-423.