User's Guide

Chapter 3 System Specifications
Drive Requirements and Compatibility
Scalar i2000 Planning Guide 57
SDLT and DLT-S Drives 3
Four generations of SDLT and DLT-S cartridges are supported in the
library, but the drives are not fully compatible (both read/write) as
shown in
table 20.
The SDLT-600 tape drives support reading and writing to SDLT II
cartridges. They also have a backward-read compatibility (BRC) mode.
When in this mode, the SDLT-600 is capable of reading SDLT-220 and
SDLT-320 tape formats in a SDLT I data cartridge, as well as the SDLT-
VS160 tape format in the DLTtape VS1 data cartridge. The SDLT-600 tape
drive will eject a data cartridge written in DLT formats other than DLT-
VS160.
The SDLT-600 backward-read compatibility transfer rates are given in
table 19.
Table 18 SDLT Drive and
Cartridge Compatibility
SDLT-600
Cartridges
SDLT-320
Cartridges
SDLT-220
Cartridges
SDLT-VS 160
Cartridges
SDLT-600 Drives Reads/Writes Reads Reads Reads
SDLT-320 Drives Not compatible Reads/Writes Reads/Writes Not compatible
DLT-S4 Read Read Read Not compatible
Table 19 SDLT and DLT Tape
Drive Backward-Read
Compatibility Transfer Rates
Format Data Cartridge type Capacity BRC Transfer Rate
a
SDLT-600 SDLT II 300 GB native
600 GB compressed
36 MB/s native
72 MB/s compressed
SDLT-320 SDLT I 160 GB 12.8 MB/s
SDLT-220 SDLT I 110 GB 8.8 MB/s