First ever LTO-9 tape drive review shows lots of promise – but also worrying weaknesses
TechRadar Pro has rcently revealed a earth special, the first ever assessment of an LTO-9 tape drive, the OWC Mercury Professional LTO.
The to start with these kinds of solution to have reached our exam bench impressed our reviewer and seasoned veteran of a lot of tape wars enough to give it a potent 4/5 ranking.
The unit is high priced (at far more than $6,000) but the simple fact that it can choose 18TB LTO-9 cartridges implies that 1PB of facts saved will price tag you just under $15,000 with the price of the product factored in. 56 tricky disk drives on the other hand cost extra (all around $18,000 with 18TB drives), are far extra fragile and much more wieldy when it arrives to relocating around (a tough disk generate weighs approximately the same as 3 tapes).
Powerful start
Some could point out that cloud backup companies like Backblaze or cloud storage organizations like Box offer you limitless storage. But your time is probably far also treasured to devote days if not months uploading terabyte-measurement files.
And though LTO-9 looks to be the best prospect for backing up substantial datasets on premise at scale, there is still lots of place for advancement. Our reviewer mentioned that an sophisticated way to handle tape has still to be located (though it is not likely that one dimensions will in good shape all).
Tape storage 101
As for the OWC tape push by itself, there had been concerns, none of which have been significant but they highlighted the reality that there’s a lot to be accomplished. “Simply getting this product since it can spam 18TB of details to a tape fairly competently isn’t ample, and there is considerably extra to making use of it that is at first apparent”, our evaluation.
Which is not to say that it is not a capable beast as it includes two other beneficial features alternatively than just the label of tape backup. You can plug in a SATA or SAS SSD/HDD in a 3.5-inch generate expansion bay for excess storage and backup ability.
OWC engineers were sensible more than enough to insert a DisplayPort connector and two Thunderbolt 3 ports which signifies you can also charge your laptop (up to 85W) and plug in an 8K check (or Television). An exterior difficult travel, a tape push and a docking station all rolled into a person.
For potential iterations, we assume the drive to have a lot more ergonomic handles, the means to update to LTO-10 just by swapping an inside drive out, OWC ArGest backup computer software bundled by default, far more ports (including a LAN one particular if possible).