LTO-7 Type M Media for LTO-8 Drives

This new cartridge is called LTO-7 cartridge initialized as Type M media (LTO-7 Type M media).

 What is it? LTO-7 Type M media is manufactured and logoed as LTO Ultrium 7 media, but is labelled with a barcode ending with “M8” as the last two characters.  It is initialized at a higher density, which allows 9 TB of native capacity or up to 22.5TB compressed (2.5:1).

Media can be purchased as pre-initialized or un-initialized LTO-7 Type M media. Un-initialized LTO-7 Type M media can be initialized by applying an “M8” barcode label and writing data to the media in a tape library that supports un-initialized LTO-7 Type M media.

What does it do? LTO-7 Type M media allows an LTO-8 drive to write 9 TB of data on a brand new LTO-7 cartridge instead of the 6 TB specified by the LTO-7 format. LTO-7 Type M media will support existing LTO technology format features including data compression, encryption and partitioning enabling LTFS, but it will not be supported on WORM cartridges.

What’s the benefit to the consumer? For the same price as an LTO-7 cartridge, consumers will benefit from 50 percent more capacity by utilizing it as an LTO-7 Type M media. However, only LTO-8 drives will be capable of reading LTO-7 Type M media, if backwards compatibility is required with LTO-9 drives, then LTO-8 media should be the preferred choice.

As we continue to see an explosion in data, worldwide IT spending will increase 4.3 percent in 2018. Here, LTO-7 Type M media for LTO-8 drives can offer data storage professionals the biggest bang for their buck! We think this is great news!