LTO8 tape drought with no solution until next year!

BREAKING NEWS: LTO8 tapes are now in short supply or unnavailable and won't be produced again until later this year.

This is due to legal battles between the two major tape manufacturers. Click to see the Bloomberg text and audio article on this issue.

In the meantime LTO8 tape library users should be able to initialise new LTO7 tapes as LTO7 M8 tapes. By following the conditions required to successfully initialise and use the 'M' or 'M8' tape which are; providing a NEW LTO7 tape that can be formatted in most LTO Ultrium 8 tape library drives with the special M8 tape barcode label applied and the latest firmware for the drives in the library, and the library itself to achieve this! Always check with the manufacturer of your LTO8 tape library as some models have this feature before others. Most LTO8 stand alone internal or external tape drives will not have the M or M8 tape initialisation function and will have to use LTO7 tapes or buy pre-initialised LTO7 M8 tapes.

These tapes will have the same speed as an LTO8 tape but will have a much higher capacity than LTO7 tapes and smaller capacity than LTO8 tapes. Please see the LTO8, LTO7 M8 and LTO7 capacity and speed specifications below. As always with LTO tape drives; half height drives are slower than full height drives.

An LTO8 data cartridge will hold up to 12TB in native or uncompressed capacity, with up to 30TB of compressed data and has a speed of up to 360MB/sec while writing native and a speed of up to 900MB/sec when writing in compressed mode.

An LTO7 M8 data cartridge will hold up to 9TB in native or uncompressed capacity, with up to 22.5TB of compressed data and have a transfer rate of up to 360MB/sec while writing native and a speed of up to 900MB/sec when writing in compressed mode.

An LTO7 data cartridge will hold up to 6TB in native or uncompressed capacity and up to 15TB of compressed capacity and have a transfer rate of up to 300MB/sec while writing data in native capacity and up to 750MB/sec while writing data in compressed capacity.

Please Contact Us for more information or clarification!