LTO 9 Tape drives incorporates the latest generation of Linear Tape-Open (LTO) technology, delivering even higher capacity than the previous generation. Providing 18TB of native capacity and up to 45TB per cartridge (with 2.5:1 compression). Symply provide LTO-9 in two drive types Full Height and Half Height. But what is the difference?
As you can see the primary difference between LTO-9 Full Height and Half Height drives is the performance, with the Full Height drive providing an extra 100MB/Sec of throughput. The additional speed also means faster seek times to data on the tape so that read or write operations begin faster on Full Height drives compared to their Half Height counterparts. It also worth noting that the higher performance of the Full Height drives is also seen when reading and writing to LTO-8 cartridges.
Full Height drives also have a much high reliability for load and unload cycles, that is not to say in any way that Half Height drives do not have a high reliability for loading and unloading media, just that as Full height drives were originally designed for enterprise tape libraries, they are built to a higher specification.