The latest generation of LTO-9 Full Height tape drives provides even higher capacity and performance, and Symply is the first company to offer the drive technology in a variety of form factors including Thunderbolt 3 and SAS connectivity in desktop and rack solution configurations. LTO-9 offers a native capacity of up to 18TB and up to 45TB compressed (assuming 2:5:1 compression).
LTO-9 is currently available as a Full-Height drive, boasting an uncompressed data transfer rate of up to 400 MBps, 100MBps or 11% faster than the LTO-8 Half-Height drives. Full-Height drives also have advantages over their Half-Height counterparts, supporting much higher load and unload cycles as well as fast seek times. LTO 9 tape drive technology is designed to optimize tape performance with the introduction of Open Recommended Access Order (oRAO), this means the Full-Height LTO 9 Tape drives can obtain data up to 73% faster. LTO-9 is fully compatible with Linear Tape File System (LTFS), and the LTO-9 drive mechanisms can read and write to the previous generation LTO-8 cartridges.
The advantages of Full-Height LTO-9 technology are too good to be only the preserve of enterprise tape libraries so Symply decide to bring the technology benefits to a wider audience by creating the world’s first LTO-9 Full Height Thunderbolt 3 attached desktop drive, and 2U rack solution featuring one or two FUll-Height LTO-9 drives. In fact they are not only available with Thunderbolt interfaces but Sympy is also the first to market with the same LTO-9 technology in desktop and rack solutions with SAS interfaces.
Using LTO-9 instead of LTO-8 means if you are archiving over a period of say an 8 hour a day, you can archive an extra 2.88TB per day, which makes difference in high pressure creative environments where deadlines are always tight.