Cost-effective, easy-to-use archiving for M&E pros, corporations, government branches, and small businesses.
By safeguarding critical data with long-term reliability and accessibility, the Mercury Pro LTO provides an industry-leading solution for data management/storage/transportation/archive strategy.
M&E professionals, corporations, government branches, and small businesses face the same challenge – how to manage an ever-increasing amount of more complex data.
The challenges…
- Higher resolution, complex audio, and diverse formats are the project norm.
- Organizational content is projected to grow 50-70% annually as more data is digitalized.
- Licensing and regulatory compliance requirements are becoming more stringent.
The answer…
The Mercury Pro LTO provides top-end performance data integrity and utilizes industry-standard Thunderbolt (Type-C), providing plug and play ease on Thunderbolt 3 and future Thunderbolt 4 equipped computers.
What is an LTO drive?
It’s archiving made drag and drop easy.
There’s a priceless familiarity in using LTO to protect your data. Using archiving industry-standard Linear Tape-Open (LTO) tapes formatted with the Linear Tape File System (LTFS), the tape can be accessed on your computer just like a hard drive or SSD. Files appear in folders and moving them to and retrieving them from tape is drag and drop easy. And compatibility has never been simpler thanks to LTFS, LTO tapes can read from a Mac, PC, or Linux system, so there’s no extra software to buy or proprietary hardware concerns.
It’s advanced yet future-ready
Because LTFS is an open, cross-platform system, and LTO tape is the dominant archiving medium that has continued to advance since being introduced in 2000. You can be confident you’ll access your data with any brand of LTO hardware for decades to come. The Mercury Pro LTO uses the latest 12TB LTO-8 tapes, the previous generation 6TB LTO-7 tapes, and designed to use future release LTO-9 drives.
Highlights
- Store more: up to 12TB native/30TB compressed storage capacity per tape cartridge
- Flexible: built-in IBM-LTO-8 Ultrium Drive reads and writes LTO-8 and LTO-7 tapes
- Store longer: up to 30-year tape longevity
- Instant ROI: Lowest cost storage format; as low as $0.02/GB and up to 50x less costly than online storage
- LTFS compatible: archive files/folders with drag and drop ease
- Simple interface: mount, format, and backup to an LTO tape and hard drive simultaneously via included myLTO® app, a $299 value
- Secure: supports AES 256-bit encryption for sensitive data
- Compliance ready: supports WORM cartridges required by legal/regulatory record keeping
- Fast tape creation: up to 360MB/s native/900MB/s compressed transfer rates
- Configurable drive bay: add an optional 2.5/3.5-inch HDD or SSD for up to 16TB ‘staging’ capacity
- Expansive: second Thunderbolt 3 port for adding up to five additional Thunderbolt devices or your choice of a USB-C or DisplayPort device
- See more: DisplayPort 1.4 for connecting up to an 8K display
- Charge while working: 85W of notebook charging
- Transportable: Compact form factor with built-in handles for moving between set and studio
- Complete: Includes LTO-8 12TB data tape, cleaning cartridge, and Thunderbolt cable
- Worry-free: up to 5 Year OWC Limited Warranty with lifetime US-based support
Lower Lifetime Costs with Far Greater Life Expectancy
A 10-year Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) study performed by the Enterprise Strategy Group comparing the costs of long-term storage on disk, LTO tape, and cloud had a staggering revelation: LTO tape-based archiving provides a 577% ROI! That’s because LTO-tape offers the lowest cost per TB storage format and the longest life expectancy.
Includes myLTO® software – A $299 value FREE!
The myLTO® software makes the OWC Mercury Pro LTO an easy and reliable solution is the included myLTO® application from Imagine Products, Inc.®. Through its simple drag-and-drop interface, myLTO® gives you powerful archive options like queuing multiple copies with copy verification notification. You can also create customized reports with thumbnails and metadata to locate files after archival quickly. Fast and safe, myLTO® uses checksum technology for guaranteed accuracy throughout the copy process.
Pricing and Availability
The Mercury Pro LTO is available to order now from MacSales.com for $4,499 and includes the myLTO® software, LTO-8 tape, and cleaning cartridge. Additional solutions up to 16TB are also available.
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“$4,499”. Thank goodness, as a business owner I was afraid this might be too expensive to justify. Oh, wait – it is! Let me know when they are on a 75% off sale.
both IBM and HP provide LTFS tools. This provides the facility to sort files, aggregate them into the copy and either write them in block order, or retrieve them in block order.
We deal with tapes that drag and drop copied, and without these utilities, only attain an average of about 80MB/sec. Makes me yearn for the days of tar when everything ran at the drive’s full speed.
Does your utility provide this function?
The myLOT software is a third party application, so it would be best to check with them to be certain this is something the offer.
Here are a few tentative scores / results we’ve gotten. Test reflects a file size of 1.08 TB, host was a Macmini8,1 running 10.15.6.
Internally mounted, 2TB 6G Extreme SSD, file transfer to LTO tape: at ~ 257 MB/s, it took roughly 70 minutes.
Tape back to the SSD: at ~ 189 MB/s, it took roughly 95 minutes.
There will be more data to share and these may not be the very best results we ultimately get, but this gives you a data point from what is essentially a recommended scenario. Someone using a fast SSD for a staging drive, installed in the enclosure, with nothing interfering with the transfer.
In HDD testing we so far have seen scores as low as 163 MB/s. Again that’s with nothing interfering, so you can imagine if someone has multiple transfers going or an older / slower drive in the equation or shared bus scenario, 80 MB/s doesn’t seem that far fetched.