Upgrading the DLT drive for a 1/9 autoloader

[Curran Riley]

We have an HP 1/9 series Autoloader, with a DLT 8000 drive.

We'd like to upgrade the drive to Super DLT (SDLT). Has anyone ever tried this? Any words of advice on what kind of drive to get?

Thanks

[CA628575]

HP currently does not support any SDLT drives in its products.

[Curran Riley]

One of the reasons we purchased this product was the potential for upgrading the drive at some point.

If it can't support SDLT technologies, what upgrades would it support?

Are there any plans for supporting the SDLT standard in the future, or are there other HP products like this that do?

Thanks,

Curran

[CA628575]

Unfortunatley there are no other HP Tape Automation products that will support the SDLT drives at this time.

However, HP does support the LTO drive which has very similar specifications to the SDLT drives in terms of capacity and performance.

In general there are upgrade paths from DLT to LTO drives, and HP also offers a media migration utility that supports copying the data from your DLT to your LTO drives (however, you would not be able to benefit from the higher capacity until the cartridges are recycled and written to full capacity, as the migration does perform a 1:1 copy and thus only uses the first 80GB of the 200GB available on LTO). That migration function is part of the HP diagnostics (HP Library & Tape Tools, downloadable at http://www.hp.com/support/tapetools)

I checked into the availability of a converstion for the 1/9 autoloader, but was unable to find a product number. I know the product itself is available with an LTO drive, but a conversion also requires a replacement of the cartridge magazines, of which the 1/9 autoloader has two. The front one is easy to replace, as it is removeable, but the back one is a bit more tricky to replace.

[CA628575]

After some more searching I've been able to find the upgrade kit product number.

To upgrade an DLT8000 1/9 autoloader to a LTO 1/9 autoloaders you have to order either

C7768A (HVD SCSI)
C7768C (LVD SCSI)

This includes the LTO drive, the front and rear magazine that needs to be replaced, 1 pc of LTO media, and 1 LTO cleaning cartridge.