Symply provide Full Height and Half Height. But what is the difference?
- Larger Motors for Performance and Reliability. The larger form factor of the Full-Height Drives allows for larger motors providing a higher performance in terms of both throughput and seek time. The larger motors also operate a lower percentage of their designed maximum load making them more reliable. The additional space within the LTO drive also allow for better cooling efficiency.
- Faster Media Movement and Acceleration. The faster motors and additional space at the tape heads all Full Height drives allows for the fast movement of the tape media through the drive. Improving the seek time both forwards and backwards through the tape media.
- Greater Tolerance to Vibration and Shock. The Full Height drive has a much more robust base plate, that aids the structural integrity of the drive, increasing the drive resilience shock and vibration.
- Higher Cartridge Insertion Force Tolerance. The loading mechanisms on the Full Height drives can handle a significantly greater insertion force. Although originally designed to better support LTO automation, the mechanism’s robustness is equally advantageous in standalone desktop and rackmount scenarios.
- Higher Performance. As we have seen Full Height Drives provide a higher throughput compared to Half-Height drives. The combination of larger motors and a better mechanical fabrication make the Full Height drives as a future-proof choice for sustained high-performance applications.
As you can see the primary difference between Full Height and Half Height drives is the performance, with the Full Height drive providing an extra 100MB/Sec of throughput.
The additional speed also means faster seek times to data on the tape so that read or write operations begin faster on Full Height drives compared to their Half Height counterparts. It also worth noting that the higher performance of the Full Height LTO-9 drives is also seen when reading and writing to LTO-8 cartridges in the LTO-9 drive, this does not apply to Half-Height Drives.
Full Height drives also have a much high reliability for load and unload cycles, that is not to say in any way that Half Height drives do not have a high reliability for loading and unloading media, just that as Full height drives were originally designed for enterprise tape libraries, they are built to a higher specification.
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