- The high-capacity LTO-10 drive provides 30 TB of internal storage for Apple Mac Mini configurations
- Offline tape storage offers additional security benefits with white space and built-in encryption
- LTO-10 desktop drive delivers SSD-like transfer speeds for long-term storage tasks
If you have serious storage needs, you’ll be interested to know that it’s possible to attach a 30TB LTO-10 tape drive to an Apple Mac Mini, which can be a useful, if quite expensive, solution for your long-term backups.
The SymplyPRO XTF SAS LTO-10 desktop tape drive natively supports transfer speeds close to what a standard SATA SSD can achieve.
LTO-10 cartridges offer a built-in capacity of 30 TB and a read and write speed of 400 MB/s. If you use compression (2.5:1) this figure rises to 75TB with a possible transfer speed of 900MB/s to 1000MB/s, although this depends entirely on how easily the data can be compressed.
LTO-10 only
SymplyPRO XTF SAS LTO-10 small full height case is available in B&H for $11,395.25. It is possible to connect to a Mac Mini or other current macOS system via a Thunderbolt to SAS compatible setup.
The device has two 12Gbps SFF8644 connectors and is supplied with the necessary cable for this connection. It also comes with a data cartridge, cleaning cartridge, international power cables and Symply’s LTFS software, so buyers can write to tape directly.
The device supports WORM cartridges and 256-bit encryption, which is useful if the goal is to protect long-term storage rather than short-term access.
Because LTO cartridges can be stored offline, they are often used to create an air gap that protects backups from remote attacks.
Combined with encryption, this approach provides another useful layer of protection if a cartridge is lost or misplaced.
LTO-10 is the next generation tape format and the drive does not support LTO-9 media, meaning existing libraries cannot be reused.
However, it will be compatible with the new 40TB built-in LTO-10 cartridges (up to 100TB compressed) announced by the LTO program last month.
LTO-10 30TB tapes cost about $300 each, compared to the LTO-9 generation, which costs about $100 (18TB native/45TB compressed).
However, the ability to connect a high-capacity desktop tape system to a compact Apple machine may be attractive to archivists, production teams, or users who need cold storage without dedicated rack hardware.
Of course, tapes are not designed to replace traditional SSDs, but their capacity, low failure rate and long life are attractive for storing large amounts of data that do not need to be accessed too often.