On Thu, 22 Aug 2002 12:24:38 -0700, Chad R. Larson <clarson AT ELDOCOMP DOT COM>
wrote:

>At 08:58 AM 8/22/02 , Ralph Brandner wrote:
>>Hi there, has anybody made experiences with tapes, written in LTO drives
>>of different manufacturers? E.g. an a tape written in a Seagate drive be
>>read in an HP drive?
>>Are the tapes interchangeable/compatible?
>
>There was a long discussion on this topic a month or two ago.  You might
>check the archives for the long story, but the short story is the LTO tapes
>are not required to be interchangeable between manufacturers.  The only
>thing specified completely enough is the tape cartridge itself.  Tapes from
>any manufacturer should work in your drives, but don't expect any other
>brand of drive to be able to read them.

The tapes should be compatible between different brands of drives (and they
probably will be), but as you correctly state, they are not required to be.

Unfortunately I have more woes to heap on this issue. The LTO standard also
does not guarantee that any particular brand of tape will work in your
drive. The LTO consortium awards tape manufacturers the right to use the
LTO logo on their products based on factors such as cartridge shape, the
contents of the CM (built-in chip) and magentic properties of the tape. The
drive manufacturers do not test all the brands of tape with their drives
and so there is no guarantee of compatibilty implied by the LTO logo.

It gets worse, there are some combinations of drive and tape that
definitely do not work reliably, as I have painfully found out in recent
weeks. I am not going to announce the brand of tape that I have had
problems with, as I don't want to be sued, but they were Seagate drives and
after changing tape brand the drives have worked extremely well. There are
at least 15 brands of LTO tape on the market, many are re-badged versions
of others. Only a few brands are recommended by the drive vendors, and I
advise you very strongly only to use a brand of tape that is recommended
both by the drive manufacturer and the jukebox manufacturer. You should be
able to obtain this information, but you may need to push your vendors to
supply it. As an example, StorageTek recommends only Fuji and Maxell media,
and Seagate recommends Seagate media (surprise) as well as Fuji, Maxell,
and Imation. If you don't follow the recommendations then you don't have
much comeback on the vendors.

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