LTO4 Drive Compatibility
Question:
Officially, the newest drives that manufacturers appear to support in the Dell PowerVault 136T / Adic Scalar 100 are LTO3.
We have LTO2 drives now, but they just aren’t quite cutting the mustard anymore. We want to take advantage of the built-in encryption capabilities of LTO4, as well as the increased performance.
Has anyone gone against manufacturer recommendations and tried installing LTO4 drives in their PV136T or Adic Scalar 100 library?
Answer:
In most cases, the library simply won’t recognize the drive. Even swapping equivalent Dell branded versus Adic branded drives can be problematic. Usually the more current firmware, the pickier the libraries are.
If you are serious about jumping straight to LTO-4, then your options are the Adic i500 and Dell ML6000 (rebranded i500, but not cross compatible). There’s also the Overland Neo4000, ArcVault 48 or Sun/Storagetek SL500 for non Dell/Adic options.
April 13 , 2009 at 10:04 AM
