mLogic Revolutionizes LTO Long-term Storage

Chesapeake Systems reviews mLogic LTO long term storage, giving valuable background info on the technology and insight into how to use LTO systems instead of hard drives for data storage.

Like the tabletop LTO drives that use SAS interfaces, mLogic’s drives use Mac or Windows software that allow LTO tapes to be formatted as LTFS, and basically treated like a mounted filesystem, even though they are really not, and the same limitations I described above apply – you cannot work with data directly from the tape, as it must first be copied back to a real filesystem, which your applications are designed to work off of. You plug the drive in via a single Thunderbolt cable, which of course couldn’t be easier. mLogic’s Thunderbolt 2 devices can work with the latest Thunderbolt 3-equipped Mac and Windows machines, so long as you use a Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter cable – no big deal. You install the Mac or Windows software, pop in a tape, format it, tell your computer how you’d like to pseudo-mount the tape as a volume or directory, and there it appears, ready for data. Pop a tape with data into another computer with an mLogic drive (or nearly any setup that can read LTFS-formatted LTO tapes), and you will be able to see your files and pull them off to disk. It really is that easy...[continue reading]