Brochure
10
Brochure | HP LTO Ultrium Storage Media
How HP LTO-6 stood the test of time
There are a number of technologies that converge to make HP LTO-6 Metal Particle tape one
of the most reliable technologies for long term archiving:
• Thinner magnetic coatings to improve recording performance at high recording densities.
• Smaller, ner particles to support increased capacities.
• Smooth tape surface to help improve overall tape solution reliability (with HP drives).
• Enhanced binder resin to avoid hydrolysis – especially relevant to archival storage.
• Armored coating to protect against premature oxidization – again, very relevant to
archival storage.
Real world archiving with HP LTO-1
While the accelerated aging tests demonstrate theoretical performance, HP is also at the
forefront when it comes to proving the ‘real world’ performance of its media. In this case,
eight LTO-1 cartridges lled with data that were archived in 2003 for the purpose of
measuring LTO Ultrium reliability during natural time.
Recently, HP engineers removed these LTO-1 cartridges from storage and conducted a series
of read/restore tests on them to conrm that the data could still be read successfully. Not only
was all the data fully recoverable, but the chart on the previous page shows that the error
rate seen by the drive for the ten year old media is indistinguishable to that for brand new
media. No noticeable degradation of any kind has occurred in the intervening period.
For more information, please refer to the detailed HP technical white paper ‘The benets of
tape for archiving’.