6TB in a pizza box

Tandberg Data reckons its latest autoloader can get 6.4TB of removable storage into a 1U rackmount space - that's 6.4TB in a 1.75 by 19-inch pizza box.

It's thanks to the arrival of half-height LTO-3 drives, and it highlights just how dense tape storage has become - although as usual with tape the capacity is nominal. LTO-3 actually stores 400GB per tape cartridge, and the 6.4TB figure depends on the drive achieving 2:1 data compression.

Called StorageLoader, the Tandberg device has two four-cartridge removable magazines.

Squeezing technology into a smaller space does mean trade-offs, with half-height tape drives offering lower performance than their full-height siblings. However, Tandberg claims this one can still paste data onto tape at over 400GB an hour.

Moving to LTO-3 allows the StorageLoader to generate non-rewritable WORM tapes for archiving, said Tandberg product veep Kjell Øyvind Aasene. He added that the $4650 (£2400) device also comes with a barcode reader and labels, rackmount kit, cabling and Symantec backup software. ®