Drive Performance; Cartridge Compatibility; Performance Rates And Times - IBM Ultrium Gen 6 Installation And User Manual

Drive performance

Details about the tape drive processing speed are shown in the following table.
Table 2. Performance rates and times
Native data rate
Maximum sustained data rate (at maximum compression)
Burst data rate
Nominal load-to-ready time
Nominal unload time
Average rewind time
Note: All sustained data rates are dependent on the capabilities of the interconnect, and application software
performance might be slower than the published performance ratings.
By using the built-in data-compression capability of the tape drive, a faster data
rate than the native data transfer rate can be achieved. However, the actual
performance of the drive is a function of many components, such as the host
system processor, disk data rate, block size, data compression ratio, SAS bus
capabilities, and system or application software.

Cartridge compatibility

The tape drive uses the IBM LTO Ultrium 2500 GB Data Cartridge and is
compatible with the cartridges of its predecessor, the IBM Half High LTO Ultrium
5 Tape Drive.
The drive has the following capabilities and limitations:
Note: To improve system performance, the drive uses a feature called speed
matching to dynamically adjust its native (uncompressed) data rate to the slower
data rate of a server. For more information about speed matching, see "Speed
matching" on page 4.
Table 3. Ultrium cartridge compatibility with Ultrium tape drives
IBM Ultrium
2500 GB
Tape Drive
(Ultrium 6)
Ultrium 6 Read/Write
Ultrium 5
Ultrium 4
Ultrium 3
Ultrium 2
Ultrium 1
Note: The IBM Half High LTO Ultrium 6 Tape Drive reads and writes Ultrium 6
cartridges to Ultrium 6 format and also reads and writes Ultrium 5 cartridges to
Ultrium 5 format, including WORM and Data Encryption.
IBM LTO Ultrium Data Cartridges
1500 GB 800 GB
(Ultrium 5) (Ultrium 4)
Read/Write Read only
Read/Write Read/Write
Read/Write
160 MB/second (with Ultrium 6 media)
550 MB/second
600 MB/second
12 seconds
17 seconds
62 seconds
400 GB 200 GB
(Ultrium 3) (Ultrium 2)
Read only
Read/Write Read only
Read/Write Read/Write
Read/Write
Chapter 1. Product description
100 GB
(Ultrium 1)
Read only
Read/Write
Read/Write
3