Overland Ultrium LTO 2 C7380
The Overland tape drive supplied to the Lab was external, that is the 5.25in full height drive unit was housed in a matching case complete with power supply. The Ultrium LTO2 cartridges have the smallest form factor of any of those tested but while they may lack in physical size, their capacity is certainly not small at 200GB native. With 2:1 compression, Overland claims a storage capacity of 400GB and the data can be protected from overwriting by a simple toggle mechanism on the cartridge.
The LTO 2 cartridge does not include bar codes, but features an embedded RF chip with a capacity of 4KB that holds initialisation information, manufacturer's data, and calibration information, which can be scanned without inserting the cartridge into a drive. During manufacture, dual servo bands are written onto the tape to provide accurate head alignment and should one band become corrupted or damaged, there is a second redundant band. There is also two levels of error correction that can recover data even when the tape sustains longitudinal scratches.
The claimed data throughput at 30MBps native and 60GBps compressed is also impressive, but like LTO 2's capacity, it also lags behind the IBM and Quantum units tested.
The unit shipped with the manual on CD along with a collections of tools and drivers, although the drivers on CD were restricted to Windows NT4, 2000 and 2003; the latter in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. There are of course drivers available for many other platforms.
Also supplied was a short SCSI cable to connect the unit's Ultra SCSI LVD 160 interface to your server. There are two SCSI LVD connectors on the rear of the unit, one in and one out, along with a SCSI ID selector and status lights for active termination and power supply fan fault.
Overall performance of the unit was very strong. The Overland was the fastest, by a tiny margin, in the uncompressed backup test and second only to the IBM in the remaining two tests.
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| Product | Overland Ultrium LTO2 C7380 |
| Price | $10,164; tapes $193 each |
| Vendor | Digital Tape Solutions |
| Phone | 02 9496 1111 |
| Web | www.dlt.com.au |
| Interoperability |  |
| Extensive platform support. | |
| Futureproofing |  |
| The Overland cartridges have less capacity than either of the IBM or Quantum. | |
| ROI |  |
| Fast with good capacity at a very reasonable price. | |
| Service |  ½ |
| Three-year RTB warranty. | |
| Rating |  ½ |
