Imation Doubles Capacity on Its Gen-5 Tape Cartridges

Minnesota is competing head-on with Colorado as a storage innovation region. With Xiotech, Compellent, 3M, Imation and some new startups all located in that northern state, there’s a lot of data storage stuff going on in the Land of 10K Lakes.

Lots of companies still use tape for data storage. And it’s not a dead tech, by any stretch. Tape is about as green as can be, too, since it doesn’t require any power or cooling when it’s at rest.

Imation made some news March 19 when it announced that it is shipping a new Gen 5 tape cartridge with nearly double the capacity as the previous version. That’s a huge improvement. Tape, like spinning disks and solid-state flash media, continues to be improved about once or twice per year. More and more bits are being squeezed onto surfaces, and it’s all to the benefit of the user.

The new Imation Ultrium LTO 5 tape is the second generation to offer drive-level, hardware-based writing of encrypted data to the tape cartridge, helping protect the storage and transport of sensitive information. It also helps address compliance objectives with WORM (Write-Once, Read-Many) functionality.

This ultra-high capacity generation of tape storage is designed for performance, capacity and reliability. It also combines linear multi-channel and bi-directional formats with enhancements in servo technology, data compression, track layout, and error correction. For additional information on LTO, go here.