History 2000: LTO Late

LTO Ultrium drive manufacturers are getting further behind. The products should initially have been launched in April, then July, and now we’re hearing talk of September for the introduction of IBM’s LTO drive, announced in October 1999.

Nor have we seen Seagate Technology’s drives, announced in March, which were supposed to ship at end of June.

Mike Matson, who was then head of HP’s storage group, assured us back in September of last year: “Our first Ultrium product will come next March.”

Now, according to Tony Rush, HP’s Ultrium marketing manager in Bristol, UK, with whom we recently spoke on the telephone,” We are close to launching our high-performance model, the other one [100GB, 5.25-inch form factor, but half-height, a slower transfer rate and a lower cost. -Ed.] will be 3 to 6 months later and we are close to having major OEMs.“

Meanwhile, media manufacturers FujiFilm and Maxell, are ready. They are the first to pass LTO program compliance testing and thus to earn the right to use Ultrium format compliance trademarks for their media products. The other media manufacturers that belong to the LTO consortium are Emtec, Imation, Quantegy, Sony, TDK and Verbatim.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 151 on August 2000 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.

Note: Bad habbit as generally there are several months between the official announcement and the availability of each generation of LTO.