November 7th, 2009 
Servo format in the LTO tape technology remains consistent throughout its product life line. This is very advantageous for the manufacturers as they can leverage their investments. Multiple sources for tape drives and media lower the production bottlenecks and as a result the investment of the users and OEMs is protected. The LTO tape cartridge’s design consists of a single hub. The recording capacity in the LTO ultrium is further enhanced with the help of data compression algorithm. Solid migration path is offered by the LTO ultrium technology. The 384 data tracks are accommodated in the LTO tape that are divided into 4 regions called the data bands.
Servo information is bounded on each data band’s bottom and top. 96 tracks are contained in each data band and each of the data-band is filled one after the other. A non-contacting cartridge memory (CM) is embedded in the ultrium cartridge which is a passive RF interface. The contents of the non-volatile memory are read by the LTO cartridge memory. Much useful information such as manufacturer’s data, initialization information and information about calibration can be retrieved from the LTO tape cartridge without inserting it into the tape drive. During the manufacturing process of LTO ultrium cleaning cartridge, servo bands are pre-written on LTO media.
Incase if any portion of the servo-code is corrupted or there is defect in any one of the serve element, then the tape head with the help of the 2nd redundant servo mechanism continues to track. Servo frames encode the longitudinal position words. So the absolute locations are accessed efficiently down the tape’s length. Error correction system in LTO ultrium consists of two levels that can recover information from longitudinal scratches on the media. Real time versification of recorded information is done in LTO tape format through its RWW (read while write) technology. The recording capacity in the LTO ultrium is further enhanced with the help of data compression algorithm.
Solid migration path is offered by the LTO ultrium technology. New technologies and features are embedded in LTO technology to provide expandability and flexibility in the product line of LTO ultrium. Ultrium format is a single reel, durable and high capacity implementation of the LTO tape storage technology. Linear tape open format is best suited for archive and backup applications. LTO delivers excellent reliability and unmatched performance in stand alone as well as in automated backup environments. Majority of the leading businesses have adopted the LTO tape storage format due to its unparalleled performance and efficiency.
Four generations of LTO tape have been introduced so far. While the fifth and sixth version of LTO ultrium will be launched into market in near future. The highest native capacity of LTO tape format is 800GB which is offered by the fourth generation LTO4 tape. The compressed capacity offerings by all the LTO tape versions are double from their native capacities. Therefore the compressed capacities of LTO1, LTO-2, LTO 3 and LTO4 ultrium tapes are 200, 400, 800 and 1600GB respectively (2:1 compression). All versions of LTO tape are very reliable, robust and deliver outstanding results and elevated performance level.
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