LTO Cartridge – Drive Compatibility Matrix Not As Deep As You Think
March 27, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
A bunch of IBM i shops that must be in the process of upgrading their tape backup systems reached out to the techies that are part of the IT Jungle collective recently and expressed surprise or dismay when they thought that the LTO 9 tape drives they were looking at would be able to read tape cartridges written by LTO 7 drives or that LTO 8 drives would be able to read LTO 6 cartridges.
This, after all, has been the pattern that we have seen in the market for a long, long time. LTO 5 drives can read and write to LTO 5 and LTO 4 cartridges as well as read LTO 3 cartridges. And LTO 6 drives can read and write LTO 6 and LTO 5 drives as well as read LTO 4 cartridges and onwards back in time to the LTO 4 drives that had three generations before them that it could read.
But alas, as we have learned, this is not these case with LTO 9 and LTO 8 drives, as you can see in this LTO cartridge-drive compatibility matrix table that we have found in the bowels of Big Blue’s documentation:
The N-2 generation read-only capability went the way of all flesh with LTO 8 and you only get N-1 support. The LTO 9 drives also only get N-1 support. Some of this is possibly due to technology changes, but it looks like someone wants to sell a whole bunch of new media, too.
It’s just another example of inflation. . . . But you needed to know.
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LTO8 is really cost effective per tera as a form of offline storage.
I personally skip LTO9 and wait LTO10 (due when? who knows), especially if it comes with a significant increase in write bandwidth besides storage density.
Does any of this have any relevance to VTL (Virtual Tape Library)? I wouldn’t think so.
No. This is for physical tape and physical tape drives only. Software can, of course, emulate anything. Whether or not it does is another matter…. HA!