Can the Ultra160 SCSI card be used with HP LTO 3 - ULTRIUM 960 EXTERNAL TAPE DRIVE

[karen ji]

Hi, I would like to know whether the ULTRA160 SCSI card or a ULTRA3 SCSI card can be used with a LTO3 Ultrium960 tape drive?

We now only have a server with Ultra160 scsi card. Apprieciate your answner.

[Richard Bickers]

It should work OK though you might not get the best performance. The drive's native rate is 80 MB/S which should give you 160 MB/S at 2:1 compression ratio - which is typical but the actual figure will depend on your data.

We recommend the U320 just to make sure your performance isn't capped but most often is the disk IO that is the limiter anyway.

Even if you don't get all the performance you will still get the capacity.

It would be worth running the performance tests in LTT (http://www.hp.com/support/tapetools) before you start to see what you get for both a server to tape drive transfer and for your disk IO rate. At least you'll know what to expect.

[karen ji]

Thank you for your reply, we are now just waiting for the tape drive to arrive then we'll start to set it up.