LTO Tape Media

LTO Ultrium was developed as a (more or less) drop-in replacement for DLT and has a similar design of 1⁄2-inch wide tape in a (slightly smaller) single reel cartridge. This made it easy for robotic tape library vendors to convert their DLT libraries into LTO libraries.
  • An Ultrium cartridge's dimensions are 102.0 x 105.4 x 21.5 (mm).
  • An Ultrium drive reads data from a cartridge in its own generation and at least the two prior generations.
  • An Ultrium drive writes data to a cartridge in its own generation and to a cartridge from the immediate prior generation in the prior generation format.
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. Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Seagate initiated the LTO Consortium, which directs development and manages licensing and certification of media and mechanism manufacturers. Seagate's tape division was spun-off as Certance and is now part of Quantum Corp.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 cartridge. A version released in 2010 can hold 1.5 TB in a cartridge of the same size.Upon introduction, LTO Ultrium rapidly defined the "super tape" market segment and has consistently been the best-selling "super tape" format. LTO is widely used with small and large computer systems, especially for backup.Click below to find pages explaining each kind of LTO tape media:

==> LTO-1

==> LTO-2

==> LTO-3

==> LTO-4

==> LTO-5

==> LTO Eraser (Video)