IBM TS3500 Manual page 17

This section describes the LTO Ultrium tape drives.
There are five generations of Linear Tape-Open (LTO) Ultrium tape drives. The newest of
these drives, the IBM® System Storage™ TS1050 Tape Drive Model F5A, is a dual-ported
drive that facilitates 8 Gbps Fibre Channel connectivity. This drive is also known as the
Ultrium 5 tape drive and is differentiated by its model number 3588 F5A.
Note: In order to support Ultrium 5 tape drives, all node cards in the library must be model
xx3-equivalent node cards. For node cards in model xx2 frames, this requires an xx3 model
conversion OR the enhanced node card(s) freature (FC 1700 or 1701).
The five generations of LTO Ultrium drives are listed below:
• IBM System Storage TS1050 Tape Drive (8 Gbps, dual ports)
• IBM System Storage TS1040 Tape Drive (4 Gbps, single port)
• IBM System Storage TS1030 Tape Drive Models F3B (4 Gbps, single port)
• IBM System Storage TS1030 Tape Drive Models F3A (2 Gbps, single port)
• IBM TotalStorage LTO Ultrium 2 Tape Drive (2 Gbps, single port)
• IBM TotalStorage LTO Ultrium 1 Tape Drive (1 Gbps, single port)
You can identify all Ultrium 2 and newer Ultrium tape drives by the logo at the front of the
drive or by the label at the rear of the drive's canister. You can identify the Ultrium 1 tape
drive by the label at the rear of its canister. An Ultrium 3 WORM-capable drive can be
identified by the level of code it contains. If the code level is 54K1 or higher, the Ultrium 3
drive is capable of WORM functionality. Ultrium 3 and newer tape drives with WORM
capability can recognize WORM-compatible media.
Ultrium 3 drives with WORM-capable firmware and newer Ultrium tape drives read and write
non-WORM media. This means that you can load WORM-capable firmware on your Ultrium 3
and newer tape drives and use any media that is supported by these drives. In this case,
only the data that is written on the WORM media is treated as WORM data; data written on
other types of media can be overwritten.
Ultrium tape drives do not read or write to 3592 tape cartridges, and 3592 tape drives do
not read or write to Ultrium tape cartridges.
The Ultrium tape drives can read tapes that have been written by non-IBM Ultrium drives.
They also write to tapes that can be read by non-IBM Ultrium drives.
All generations of Ultrium tape drives and cartridges can reside in the same frame.