IBM Unveils LTO-8 Tape Drives

October 16, 2017 Alex Woodie

The not-so-long wait for the latest Linear Tape-Open gear is finally over, as members of the LTO Consortium last week unveiled their latest drives capacity of storing 30 TB of compressed data. Among the first consortium members unveiling product was IBM, which announced its first two LTO-8 Ultrium drives.

LTO-8 drives can store up to 12 TB of data on a single LTO-8 cartridge, and move data at rates up to 360 MB/sec. With 2.5-to-1 compression turned on, the capacity of LTO-8 drives jumps to 30 TB while the transfer rates increases to 900 MB/sec. That corresponds to a 100 …