Brochure
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Brochure | HP LTO Ultrium Storage Media
HP LTO Ultrium Archival Life testing
If you place a tape into an archive and a legal ocer, sales manager, publisher or newsroom
manager asked you to produce the data ten years from now, how certain would you be that it
would be preserved, complete and good as new? The uncontrollable growth of data, combined
with the necessity of keeping it safe, means that tape storage is still the best solution when it
comes to long term archiving.
Not only is tape highly scalable and cost-eective, it oers signicant benets when considering
how to protect information over a period spanning years and even decades.
While a real time machine would be a true miracle, in the world of tape media, the next best thing
is the HP Brand Specication for HP LTO Ultrium media. HP’s exhaustive archival testing is the
only way to prove that HP branded LTO media will perform to the highest standard throughout
its working life.
In order to prove archival durability, HP needed to conduct accelerated aging tests. External
academic research has shown that 252 days storage at 55°C/131°F and 80% Relative Humidity
is equivalent to a predicted archival life of 30 years, when stored at 25°C/77°F.
These torturous conditions are extremely unusual and well outside the normal recommended
operating environments for tape media. Bear in mind the hottest climactic temperature ever
recorded on Earth was a ‘mere’ 134°F at Death Valley, California in 1913.
HP stored the most advanced HP LTO-6 Metal Particle cartridges at 55°C/131°F and 80% R.H.
for a total of 252 days (36 weeks). From the chart, it is clear that the error rate of the media barely
changes from when it was new in comparison to when it had become ‘old’. That means you
could be condent that your data would be as recoverable in 2040 as the day you recorded it
in 2013.
Change in Base Error Rate for LTO-6 media over a simulated 30 year period
HP LTO-6 Cart 1
HP LTO-6 Cart 2
Number of Years
Change in Read BER
0 5 10 15 20 25 30
1.5
1.0
0.5
0.0
- 0.5
- 1.0