Recommend a tape drive that supports 3TB tapes

[dictum9]

My tape drive is apparently having issues, will restore data but in the middle come up with an I/O error and stop writing. I narrowed it down to the tape drive, even with brand new tapes and across different servers. It's an HP Ultrium drive. 

[Bill Hassell]

Definitely not enough information.

What model is the the server?
OS version?
Ultrium model?

VERY IMPORTANT: there are many different server models that can run a select number of HP-UX versions which can only support certain models of tape drives. Before jumping onto the very latest Ultrium tape drive, you need to verify that it is supported on your platform. Also, the tapes for Ultrium (no different for DLT or DDS, etc) are *NOT* interchangeable. You can't put an LTO5 tape into an LTO3 drive. There are specific backward compatibility rules for each generation

Also, the term 3 TB tape is a marketing ploy. An LTO5 tape *CANNOT* store 3 TBytes of random data. It will store 1.5 TBytes and with special encoding (called compression) on a stream of highly repeatable data, the apparent amount might reach 3 TB. Here's a useful table:

[dictum9]

What's the best tape drive  for rx8640?  

would this work? 

HPE StoreEver LTO-6 Ultrium 6250 External Tape Drive(EH970A)

[Bill Hassell]

The LTO6 can store 2.5 TB of random data, a bit more if the data patterns are compressible. However, the LTO6 is an extremely fast tape drive. The absolute low limit of data from your disk must be more than 54 MB/sec or the drive will have to pause, back up and start again. For full performance, you'll disk transfers more than 575 MB/sec, much more than that for compressible data. These transfer rates are way beyond the capability for JBOD disks, and for modern disk arrays, you need some careful design work to meet these transfer rates.

Is the goal for storage on tape to eliminate changing tapes during the backup? If so, the LTO6 is a very expensive solution compared to a small autochanger using LTO3 or LTO4 tape drives.