Is your LTO media compatible with your drives?

or, not all LTO media is created equal.

There’s an assumption that because LTO is a standard shared by multiple vendors, then any Ultrium media can be used in any Ultrium drives. (NB: Of course I’m referring here to the same version – i.e., version 4 media in a version 4 drive, or version 3 media in a version 3 drive, etc.*)

While technically this should be true, in practice it usually isn’t. I don’t wish to name vendors here, but suffice to say that I’ve had real-world experience, both in implementation and support scenarios, where tape drives have come from vendor A, but media was purchased from vendor B due to cheaper prices, and there’s been no end of “fun”. (That’s for very small values of “fun”, as a one-time colleague of mine used to say.)

When this has happened it’s usually manifested in one of a few different ways:

Excessive numbers of media failures – e.g., hard errors.
High numbers of tapes filling before they should – e.g., a 400GB tape filling at 300GB, 250GB, etc.
Significant slow-downs accompanied by SCSI warnings.

In such cases after all other possibilities have been eliminated – hardware, software, firmware, operational handling, etc. – these sorts of problems have been eliminated by changing media. I should note that in such situations, I’ve had customers actually send their media back to whom they purchased it from, who tested it, and certified it as being 100% OK. OK in different drives, that is.

This is not a posting recommending that you always buy media from whatever vendor your tape drives came from. I would however suggest the following:

Media that comes from the same manufacturer as your tape drive vendor will be OK.
Media that comes from reputable media vendors that don’t make competing tape drives should also be OK.
If one vendor’s media is ridiculously cheap – e.g., half the price from one vendor than it is from all others, then maybe you should exercise caution before committing your backups to it.
Any decent media supplier will be able to tell you which media is recommended for use with a particular vendors’ tape drives.
Most hardware vendors do actually, if you look closely enough, recommend particular media vendors. This will undoubtedly include their own, but it usually includes 2 or 3 others. You should trust that information.

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* I haven’t forgotten about backwards compatibility of media – e.g., any LTO-x drive must be able to read x-2 media and write x-1 media in addition to x media.

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