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IBM LTO-Ultrium 2

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PCQ Bureau
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This IBM drive uses the same LTO-Ultrium 2 tape cartridges as the HP drive and has a native capacity of 200GB. However the rated transfer rate is higher than the HP drive, standing at 123GB/hr as against 105GB/hr. Its test results were quite interesting. In backing up 50 GB of commonly used office files, itgave a transfer rate of 69.4 GB/hr, which was lower than HP. But it reached near its rated speed in streaming backup at 109 GB/hr, which was also higher than HP. The drive also gave very good results while restoring data, and its compression ratio was 21%, which was higher than HP. This basically saves you about 9-10GB in 50GB space. One problem we found was that its actual available capacity after formatting came to 186 GB, while the HP drive showed 196 GB. 

This was the only drive to have an LCD panel, which gave useful information about the drive's status. The drive's price is about 20% lower than the HP drive, but has the same cost per GB for tape since that's the same. While it has good overall performance, one caveat is the 1 year warranty, as against 3 years given by HP. 

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IBM LTO-Ultrium 2
Key Specs  : high compression ratio and stream backup rate, slightly low in the regular backup test, informative LCD panel on the drive.
Price  : Rs 315,000 (drive), Rs 3098 (media), Cost/GB (media): Rs 15.49
Warranty  : 1

Year(s)
Interface  : SCSI
Tape Media  : LTO-ULTRIUM 2, Backward compatibility: LTO-ULTRIUM 1
Rated native/compressed capacity  : 200/400 GB

Actual formatted capacity  : 186 GB
Rated native/compressed Transfer Rate  : 123/246 GB/hr

Measured backup Transfer Rate  : 69.4GB/hr
Compression ratio achieved for 10 GB data  : 21%

Contact  : IBM India Ltd, Bangalore
Tel  : 91-124-256 6111
E-mail  : selvak@in.ibm.com
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