>It's my understanding that the LTO drives are strictly streaming
>devices.  One person I've talked with indicated that LTO will be very
>fast, if you can supply the data. If not, you will be very
>disappointed in it's performance. If the drive has to back-hitch,
>performance will be severely affected.  From what I've read, IBM
>claims that Magstar drives back-hitch much faster than any streaming
>tape drive.

On page 1 of the 3590 Hardware Reference manual is an important note,
which can be overlooked as blah-blah in the "Exceptional Performance"
paragraph:
   The Magstar 3590 models have leading-edge streaming and start/stop
   performance. This is important since most applications operate in
   start/stop mode.

I should think that the combined experience of the vendors involved would
make LTO drives as proficient in real-world start/stop performance.
We'll see.
                 Richard Sims, BU