Sony’s Storage Media Division has signed the LTO-6 licensing agreement with Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Quantum. This agreement now allows Sony to start development of its LTO-6 Ultrium tape media. The estimated storage capacity will be 8TB per tape using compression.

The 6th generation (LTO-6) tape technology is designed to support the ever-increasing capacity requirements of today’s data rich storage environments.  Each cartridge will be able to store up to an estimated native 3.2TB (8TB 2.5:1 compressed) of data in one cartridge.  This new generation of the LTO Ultrium format will also deliver a data transfer rate of up to 210MB/s native (525MB/s compressed).

Specific features of Sony’s LTO-6 Ultrium tape cartridge media: 

•  Increased storage capacity, achieved with a newly developed magnetic particle and advances in manufacturing technology, which allow for higher recording density.
• LTFS partitioning feature as previously introduced on LTO-5 tapes.

Sony’s development of the LTO-6 format demonstrates its continued commitment to support an impressive range of storage media products that also includes formats such as AIT, AIT-Turbo, 5.25-inch Magneto Optical (MO Disk), DAT 160/320 and others.

Techware will continue to offer tape drive repair and tape library repair services for all of the most popular data tape drive formats – LTO, DLT, SDLT, AIT, 8mm, 4mm, etc.