Fujifilm LTO-7 Type M Tape Storage Receives Notable Increase

Fujifilm has reported a sizeable increase in the use of LTO tape storage media since the development and introduction of LTO-7 Type M, the native 9TB LTO tape created by converting a standard native 6TB LTO-7 tape.

Fujifilm Australia sales manager for recording media Jeff Brown explained, “You can now convert a standard 6TB LTO-7 tape and make it act like a 9TB LTO-8 in one easy step. To do this you simply take a Fujifilm LTO-7 Ultrium and initialize it in an LTO-8 drive within an automation environment that supports the LTO Type M standard. The tape then immediately becomes native 9TB.”

The new cartridge that’s been created is called an LTO-7 Type M cartridge and uses an automation barcode label ending with “M8.”

According to Brown, there are a couple of technicalities that potential LTO-7 converters need to be aware of too as he explained, “LTO-7 Type M cartridges can only be created from new, unused Fujifilm LTO-7 media and once a cartridge is initialized as 9TB Type M it may not be changed back to a 6TB LTO-7 cartridge.”

He also mentioned that LTO-7 Type M cartridges are only initialized to Type M in an LTO-8 drive within a tape library that has been configured to initialize cartridges with a M8 barcode to Type M, in other words LTO-7 drives are not capable of reading LTO-7 Type M cartridges.

With this in mind, Brown’s customers and users of Fujifilm LTO tapes have taken to LTO-7 Type M in significant numbers.

He concluded, “We have seen a major spike in sales and usage of LTO-7 tapes as more and more users now convert them to LTO-7 Type M. In short, LTO-7 Type M provides cost-effective, trouble free and reliable native 9TB storage. It’s another excellent LTO storage option and it’s available now.”