Backup medium number 1: IBM announced the first LTO drive 25 years ago
25 years ago, IBM announced the first tape drive according to the Linear Tape Open specification. Now the company is the last manufacturer of LTO drives.
Drives for LTO-1 tapes were still quite a beast.
(Image: pioparts)
Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Seagate joined forces more than 25 years ago to develop a standard for tape drives and put an end to the previous proliferation. From the very beginning, Linear Tape Open (LTO) was designed to store more data with each generation. The tapes were intended to provide much cheaper storage for large archives.
By today's standards, however, the first generation was still quite slow. The drive was supposed to shovel 15 MByte/s onto the tape, which IBM announced on October 27, 1999 under the name StorageSmart Ultrium. The tapes held 100 GByte – capacity and speed could be increased by a maximum of 2.5 times through compression.
c't first reported on LTO – in issue 19/2000. The drives were only "about to be delivered" around a year after the announcement. The prices were between 4500 and 7500 US dollars, the tape costs were quoted by IBM at around 1.30 US dollars per GByte. In Germany, tapes from Fuji Magnetics and the BASF subsidiary Emtec Magnetics were to be available.
IBM LTO-1-Laufwerk (2 Bilder)
Generation leap
Today, LTO version 9 is current, the tapes store 18 TByte, with compression, the capacity should even be 45 TByte – suitable data, of course. The first LTO 10 drives and the associated tapes are expected to come onto the market in late 2024 or early 2025. The capacity of a single tape increases to an uncompressed 36 TByte and the transfer speed is expected to be 1.1 GByte/s.
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Current LTO drives can read and write tapes of their and the previous version; earlier models were still able to read data from predecessors. Archives are therefore practically forced to keep up with every generation change in order to avoid being stuck with outdated technology.
Even today, however, there are still stores that sell refurbished LTO drives from the first generation, such as pioparts.
Seagate sold its tape business to Quantum a few years ago and thus left the LTO consortium. However, Quantum and HP no longer build their own drives either. Should IBM one day also decide to stop building tape drives, the LTO story would be over after more than 25 years. However, the plans for future LTO versions go as far as generation 14 in a few years' time, which will then store 576 TByte on one tape.
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