UNITEX Corporation Launches New LTO Tape Drive With LTO-9 Technology and the World's Only USB Connection

[TheLostSwede]

UNITEX Corporation, the leader in the computer storage space for over 30 years, is pleased to announce today that its popular USB LTO tape drive will be available with LTO-9 technology in the spring of 2022. It features USB connectivity, a native storage capacity of 18 TB and compressed storage capacity at 2.5:1 of 45 TB, and a data transfer rate of up to 300 MB/second.

UNITEX Corporation has specialized in the computer storage space since it was founded in 1990. Over the years, UNITEX has developed various driver and application software, greatly increasing interoperability and making storage devices compatible across the entire spectrum of computer operating systems. This solid history and experiences make UNITEX an extremely reliable data storage solution provider.




UNITEX USB LTO-9 highlights

• LTO-9 tape archiving solution with the world's only USB connectivity
  You can use USB LTO-9 by connecting to laptop PCs and other USB devices to store large volumes of data anywhere, conveniently, with small IT-invested. Both half-height (HH) and full-height (FH) drives are available.
• Increased capacity. Increased speed.
  Offering up to 45 TB of storage capacity (18 TB for non-compressed data), a 50% greater capacity than LTO-8. Transfer speeds with USB connection reach up to 300 MB/ second, a 25% faster than the previous USB LTO-8.
• Offering protection against cyber crime
  LTO tape can be stored offline and off-network, creating a physical "air gap" of protection to minimize the risk of data exposure to cyber attacks. In addition UNITEX archiving software protects your data safely with tamper-proof by hash value and encryption functions.
• Lower environmental impact
  LTO tape and USB connectivity have a significantly lower environmental impact as there is no need to have it constantly powered-on during data storage, thereby reducing CO2 emissions generated by 94% when compared to hard disk drives (HDDs).

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[repman244]

This is wrong on so many levels...

 

[genralramius]

This is wrong on so many levels...

What the type of media or?

 

[MachineLearning]

This is wrong on so many levels...

It's the world's only USB connection! No others like it! Though, rather hard to use...

 

[bug]

I must have been living under a rock, but I have never heard of UNITEX before.

Pop quiz: how long does it take to move 18TB of data over a 300MB/s interface?

 

[repman244]

What the type of media or?

Nothing wrong with the media, it's still one of the best backup solutions.

But using USB interface, throttling the drive down to just 300MB/s (when it can do around 450MB/s uncompressed and around 1GB\s compressed), and the best of all marketing it for laptop use? Using it on every device? Good luck you need good backup software as well.
The drive will never be used to it's full potential, the price for LTO 9 drives is really high so what is the point.

 

[Octavean]

I must have been living under a rock, but I have never heard of UNITEX before.

Pop quiz: how long does it take to move 18TB of data over a 300MB/s interface?

How long!?!

I believe the time duration is, let’s see, carry the 1, divide through, take the Log of the derivative, factor through,…..

Yeah, just as I suspected, the answer is: “Too damn long”

(googles “the rent is too damn high” meme)

 

[LabRat 891]

Been looking at old LTO drives and tapes for archiving security footage. Biggest issue was interface. Even though this is way outside my budget, very pleased to see Superspeed USB connectivity on new generation LTO.
For data that needs to be retained, but rarely ever accessed, Magnetic tape has yet to be beat.

 

[sam_86314]

I must have been living under a rock, but I have never heard of UNITEX before.

Pop quiz: how long does it take to move 18TB of data over a 300MB/s interface?

The answer is about 17 hours.

But that's kind of missing the point of tape-based storage. I personally view tape as a way to store your data safely in the event of some sort of disaster. Like if your house burns down, you could've backed up everything to a tape and kept it in a fire safe. You won't be accessing it randomly; only in certain situations.

As someone who has a large amount of data stored on my server, I could absolutely see myself investing in tape when I can afford to.

Tape would pretty much be the only viable way to back up the 12.6TB of data I store on my server. I have individual things like family photos and videos backed up onto archival Blu-ray discs and stored in a fire-safe, but I currently have no real way to back everything up in the event of cascading drive failures or if my server somehow got compromised by malware. The only option I currently have would be to back up what I can to the 8TB hard drive I have, and everything else would be lost.

With tape, I could get a 20TB tape and let my server back up to it overnight. I could probably run these backups once a month. Then, in the event of a disaster, I still have pretty much everything and can restore the backup onto a new server.

 

[dragontamer5788]

It always amazes me how cheap tapes are: 18 TB for $170.

Quantum LTO-9 Ultrium Data Cartridge LTO9 MR-L9MQN-01

Please note we now have the added option of Initializing your tape cartridges for you. Please select the initialization option above if you would like to add that service. Tape cartridge part numbers vary widely for a single tape model. We list all documented part numbers and their meaning...

ltoworld.com

So... how expensive is this tape drive? $1000? $2000? $3000? That's always where they get ya.

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The funny thing is, 300MB/s is faster than most hard drives. If you have purely sequential use case (ie: backups), its actually better to use tape drives than a hard drive. (Well, not really, because you can RAID0 hard drives together for cheaper than this tape drive).

Tapes have poor seeking performance (it takes maybe 2 minutes to wind the tape to the location of your data), but it will read/write at that location at pretty good rates.

 

[bug]

It always amazes me how cheap tapes are: 18 TB for $170.

Quantum LTO-9 Ultrium Data Cartridge LTO9 MR-L9MQN-01

Please note we now have the added option of Initializing your tape cartridges for you. Please select the initialization option above if you would like to add that service. Tape cartridge part numbers vary widely for a single tape model. We list all documented part numbers and their meaning...

ltoworld.com

So... how expensive is this tape drive? $1000? $2000? $3000? That's always where they get ya.

--------

The funny thing is, 300MB/s is faster than most hard drives. If you have purely sequential use case (ie: backups), its actually better to use tape drives than a hard drive. (Well, not really, because you can RAID0 hard drives together for cheaper than this tape drive).

Tapes have poor seeking performance (it takes maybe 2 minutes to wind the tape to the location of your data), but it will read/write at that location at pretty good rates.

Even mechanical HDDs can approach the 500MB/s limit of SATA when transferring sequentially. But, as pointed out above, that's not the point of backups.

 

[Octavean]

I’d really like to have something like this LTO-9 tape backup. Unfortunately I’ve always considered a viable version of tape backup either too expensive or too old (earlier LTO versions).

What I’ve done thus far is just duplicated the data on a NAS or server onto another NAS or server in a different location. So one NAS (Synology DS1815+) has 8 HDD’s each 8TB in SHR (~RAID 6) with additional external RAID enclosures (duplicated as well) and another NAS has 6 HDDS of 14TB capacity in RAID 5 (also with external RAID enclosures).

A tape backup would make things a lot easier and less prone to failure.

 

[dragontamer5788]

Even mechanical HDDs can approach the 500MB/s limit of SATA when transferring sequentially

https://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/exos-x16-DS2011-1-1904US-en_US.pdf

Seagate Exos 16TB is only 261 MB/s. I'd be surprised if any hard drive were over 300MB even in the best case scenario. Tape, strangely enough, has recently had better sequential performance than hard drives.