Production of LTO-5 Media Beginning

Four of the five LTO tape media manufacturers have been licensed by the LTO consortium for new – but late -LTO-5: Fujifilm, Imation, TDK and Sony. One is currently missing to the list: Maxell.

Sony announced its arrival last month. The same day, March 19, three other ones published a press release (see today’s news) on the subject, Fujifilm, Imation and its partner TDK, saying that their media is now in production and available.

All their LTO-5 have the same specs: native 1.5TB capacity and up to 140MB/s transfer rate, dual partitioning, AES 256-bit encryption, read/write compatible with LTO-4 and read compatible with LTO-3.

Compared to LTO-4, the tape width (12.65mm) remains the same. The increased capacity is the result of thinner media (6.4µm vs. 6.6µm), longer length (846m vs. 820m) and mainly track density increased from 896 to 1,280.

The LTO consortium is headed by HP, IBM and Quantum, but the to first two companies, supposed to be the only manufacturers of LTO-5 drives, have not announced their devices, even if Overland and Quantum already said that their LTO-5 tape units – coming from one of the two sources – are available. As these two latter firms probably get their units from HP, maybe IBM is late and waiting to be ready to make together a common formal announcement. Here is the paradox: officially today, you can get LTO-5 media but not the drive to run them directly from the manufacturers.

By email, Bob Wilson, VP of HP storage platforms division, wrote:" I cannot officially comment on anyone LTO-5 availability or HP’s. I think it is safe to say you should see plenty of LTO-5 announcements over the next 2-3 months."

Does it mean no drive’s announcement before two to three months?