Yes, that is correct - HP had this feature with LTO1.  I did hear,
however, that this created some interoperability issues.  If you
wrote a tape on an HP LTO1 drive, there was a chance you would have
trouble reading it back on other vendors drives, because the tracks
weren't written quite according to spec.  Don't know the full history
- I'm guessing they probably fixed this.  HP drives are also less
expensive - they have more plastic parts inside them.

Just checked, and we did 2,317 tape mounts on our 13 LTO2 drives
yesterday.  We see few problems.  We have seen some timeouts (error
78) but they don't cause us any problems - TSM seems to recover from
them.  We see maybe one a month on average, sometimes going several
months at a time without seeing any.  We haven't figured out what's
causing them yet.  I don't think we've replaced any drives (one at
most) over the 2 years that we've had them.  Library is ADIC Scalar
10000 which is very solid too.  The newer model is called a Scalar
i2000 and I hear it's also very nice.  It supports multiple drive
types, possibly including the high-end IBM drives.  Support is solid
and proactive, directly from ADIC.

..Paul

At 02:20 PM 8/8/2006, Richard Rhodes wrote:

HP LTO1 drives also had the ability to vary their speed.  This was
one of the main reasons we purchase HP LTO1 drives instead of
IBM LTO1 a long time ago.

3592 drives also have this ability.

Rick

--
Paul Zarnowski                            Ph: 607-255-4757
Manager, Storage Services                 Fx: 607-255-8521
719 Rhodes Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-3801    Em: psz1 AT cornell DOT edu