Plasmon LTO 10.1 Autoloader.(Hardware Review)(Evaluation)

PLASMON IS ONE of the many companies that participate in the LTO (Linear Tape-Open) licensing program, which gives members the right to resell or manufacture products based on Ultrium technology. The list of licensees, which you can view at www.lto.org, includes vendors such as ADIC, Exabyte, Hitachi, NEC, Overland Data, and Sony.

Plasmon offers Ultrium autoloaders and libraries but no single- cartridge units. The company's high-end library, the LTO 500.10, can store 50TB of data, and it can be equipped with as many as 10 Ultrium drives. We reviewed the LTO 10.1, an entry-level autoloader with a single tape drive, manufactured by IBM, and 10 cartridge slots. The LTO 10.1 is a step up from the IBM 3581 in both capacity and slot accessibility.

By making the LTO 10.1 about 2 inches longer and 1 inch taller than the IBM 3581, Plasmon found room for a removable, seven-cartridge magazine. Three more slots are accessed by removing the magazine; however, to insert cartridges into these inner slots we either had to fiddle with the unit's control panel or slide in an arm up to the elbow

The LTO 10.1 was the only unit in our test group with separate SCSI connectors for robotics and tape drive. This comes in handy if you want to minimize the impact of controller failures, but otherwise it merely clutters the back of the unit with an additional jumper cable between robotics and drive. The unit ships with all the necessary SCSI cables and terminators, and the LTO 10.1 user guide clearly describes how to make the SCSI connections.

Oddly, Plasmon does not include drivers for the unit, and the otherwise comprehensive documentation doesn't offer suggestions for software installation. Both Windows and Arcserve 2000, our backup software from Computer Associates, recognized the machine as an IBM unit, and we had no problems running our test backups.

We ended up with ...