TechRadar Pro has rcently published a environment exclusive, the initial ever assessment of an LTO-9 tape drive, the OWC Mercury Pro LTO.
The very first this kind of solution to have reached our examination bench impressed our reviewer and seasoned veteran of numerous tape wars more than enough to give it a strong 4/5 rating.
The machine is high priced (at far more than $6,000) but the actuality that it can just take 18TB LTO-9 cartridges means that 1PB of knowledge saved will cost you just less than $15,000 with the cost of the product factored in. 56 tough disk drives on the other hand value much more (close to $18,000 with 18TB drives), are significantly far more fragile and more wieldy when it comes to going about (a hard disk travel weighs roughly the same as a few tapes).
Solid get started
Some may point out that cloud backup providers like Backblaze or cloud storage businesses like Box offer unrestricted storage. But your time is likely significantly as well treasured to shell out days if not months uploading terabyte-sizing information.
And whilst LTO-9 seems to be the ideal applicant for backing up huge datasets on premise at scale, there’s nevertheless a great deal of room for advancement. Our reviewer observed that an elegant way to regulate tape has but to be located (whilst it is not likely that a person dimensions will match all).
Tape storage 101
As for the OWC tape push itself, there ended up problems, none of which were being vital but they highlighted the fact that there is a lot to be performed. “Simply obtaining this machine for the reason that it can spam 18TB of information to a tape moderately efficiently is not ample, and there is noticeably a lot more to using it that is in the beginning apparent”, our review.
That’s not to say that it is not a capable beast as it contains two other helpful features fairly than just the label of tape backup. You can plug in a SATA or SAS SSD/HDD in a 3.5-inch travel expansion bay for extra storage and backup ability.
OWC engineers were good plenty of to incorporate a DisplayPort connector and two Thunderbolt 3 ports which indicates you can also cost your notebook (up to 85W) and plug in an 8K keep an eye on (or Tv set). An exterior really hard push, a tape travel and a docking station all rolled into a single.
For long term iterations, we count on the travel to have extra ergonomic handles, the potential to up grade to LTO-10 simply just by swapping an interior travel out, OWC ArGest backup software program bundled by default, extra ports (together with a LAN a single if feasible).
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