Brochure
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Brochure | HP LTO Ultrium Storage Media
Industry standards reveal much. HP demands much more.
The Compliance Verication (CV) process for the awarding of LTO Ultrium logo status is primarily
concerned with interchange, to ensure products from dierent vendors work across platforms.
It is not a measure of quality – i.e. how reliably those products perform.
HP Storage Media Brand testing requires potential HP LTO cartridges to pass a number of
extremely demanding procedures that other media are never subjected to during CV evaluation.
All tests must be successfully negotiated for HP to qualify and ship the HP LTO cartridges.
And where there is overlap with CV, the HP procedures are tens, sometimes hundreds of times
more stressful. For example, the HP Locate/Rewind/Append test surpasses the industry-standard
by 1000%. And the Shoeshine test, which measures the ability of the media to withstand
repeated passes over the tape head, repeats for 25,000 cycles. The Industry Logo test has
no Shoeshine equivalent.
That’s why the HP brand specication is the most demanding measure of how storage media
is used in real life, not just in once-a-year logo tests.
Since 2000, HP has shipped over 80 million LTO Ultrium cartridges and been the leading
brand of storage media throughout that time. Every cartridge that bears the HP logo is the
culmination of HP’s extreme testing.
Unrivalled scale and depth
The cornerstone of the HP branded LTO Ultrium media specication is our leading position as
a tape solution provider. But to achieve comprehensive coverage and cover all potential customer
environments, HP uses both HP and non-HP drives to test HP brand LTO media. No matter
what model of hardware you own, HP LTO Ultrium data cartridges are an outstanding choice.
The testing falls into three key areas:
1. Ongoing testing, including ‘Green Tape’* and Full Volume Life.
2. Archival Life testing.
3. Interleave testing.
* A green tape is a brand new data cartridge that
has never been previously used. Green tape tests
are important because newer media is typically
more abrasive than cartridges that have been
used several times. Duty cycles using large
quantities of green tape (e.g. archiving) aect
drive performance dierently than those where
tapes have been used and rotated repeatedly.