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## 2.3.2 LTO performance 

Figure 2-18 shows a new LTO 8 data cartridge. 

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IBM LTO drives provide high performance and continue to improve with each new generation of products. Applications that are highly dependent on tape-processing speed can benefit from the significant performance that is provided by the LTO Ultrium tape drives. 

IBM LTO Ultrium drives provide high-speed tape operations and relief to users who have difficulty completing tape activities in the time available. For those applications with limited system backup windows or have large amounts of disk data to back up, LTO Ultrium tape drives are ideal. 

By using the built-in data-compression capability of the LTO Ultrium drive, far greater data rates than the decompressed data rate can potentially be achieved. However, the actual throughput is a function of many components, such as the host system processor, disk data rate, block size, data compression ratio, SCSI bus capabilities, and system or application software. Installing multiple tape drives in general (or more than two in the case of IBM LTO) on a single SCSI bus can adversely affect data transfer rates. 

## IBM LTO Ultrium 3 tape drive 

The IBM LTO Ultrium 3 Drives offered more than double the performance of IBM Ultrium 2 with sustained data rates of 80 MBps native and 160 MBps with a 2:1 compression ratio. IBM Ultrium 3 provides speed matching with five speeds for Ultrium 3 and Ultrium 2 cartridges and reads and writes an Ultrium 2 cartridge at the speed of the Ultrium 2 drive. 

The IBM LTO Ultrium 3 tape drive has the following performance characteristics: 

GLYPH<SM590000> 80 MBps native sustained data transfer rate 

GLYPH<SM590000> 160 MBps sustained data transfer rate at a 2:1 compression ratio 

