IBM Data Cartridges

For more than 50 years, IBM has been developing innovative media technologies and solutions. From tape media to optical, IBM media products reflect the high standards of a proven industry leader in storage technology. IBM is dedicated to the ongoing excellence required by our tape customers. As technology progresses, we continue to advance the capabilities of IBM Tape Media to ensure it continues to meet customers' evolving requirements.

IBM uses specific technologies that improve the tape's performance.

• With IBM's patented surface control guiding system edge wear is not a worry in guiding the tape, enabling us to generate less debris and deliver increased performance.

• IBM LTO tape drives' tape head employs the patented Magneto Resistive flat lapped head design. This design helps reduce tape wear by decreasing the tape to head contact found in competitive tape drives. This head design helps improve performance, accuracy and reliability of reads/writes and helps to reduce rewrites caused by debris.

• Grooved Roller Surface Control Guiding, helps to stabilize the lateral movement of tape across the head, reducing the amount of re-reads or writes that might occur with less stable tape paths.

LTO certification requires interchangeability and defined capacity but not quality or reliability. By specifying only those features needed for interchange of tape cartridges among various vendors tape drives, the Ultrium format retains flexibility. This flexibility allows for a substantial amount of implementation freedom in performance characteristics, form factor, reliability, controllers, and interfaces, while ensuring that tape cartridges remain interchangeable among Ultrium tape drives.
IBM consistently defines extremely high standards for IBM LTO cartridges.
This ensures high quality tape to customers. IBM media undergoes extensive testing of:

• 300 full file passes
• 1 million head passes
• 20,000 load/unload cycles
• 20,000 short section durability passes in all environments

IBM is proud to say that quality is our biggest differentiator. This applies to the design, development, testing and manufacturing processes that IBM utilizes which enable us to provide superior media.
We believe IBM media is the best performing, most durable and reliable LTO^TM cartridge available for use with IBM Ultrium^TM Tape Drives. IBM Media is thoroughly tested including Environment Durability Tests which are preformed at all "five corners" of the Temperature and Humidity extremes.