HP 460 LTO-Ultrium 2

This drive is for entry to mid range environments and has a native capacity of 200 GB. According to the specs, the drive can back up 200 GB in less than two hrs. In our tests, which backed up commonly used files in an office, the drive could do this in just above two hrs, which is good. It also compressed backup data by about 17%, saving about 7.2 GB of tape space out of 50 GB. This is a big saving over a long period of time. Of course, if you use the drive to backup only a single highly compressible file format, you could get greater compression. The drive was a bit slower to restore, giving a rate of only 46GB/hr. The drive comes with tape alert snap-ins for HP Openview and CA Unicenter network management software, which can help to manage the drive over the network. It has also got several informative status and diagnostic LEDs. While the tape drive was the most expensive of the lot, it has the lowest per GB cost for the media. This is important because the overall cost incurred in purchasing media over a drive’s usable life can amount to the drive’s purchase cost.