Imation New High Capacity Ultrium Tape Cartridges

Imation Corp. today announced the availability of Imation Black Watch(TM) Ultrium(TM) tape cartridges for the Ultrium tape system, which features 15 MB/sec native transfer rate, and four cartridge capacities of 20, 60, 100 and 200GB capacity (2:1 compression).

“Imation brings nearly 50 years of removable media development and manufacturing expertise to the new Ultrium storage platform,” said Steve Ladwig, president of Imation Data Storage and Information Management. “Imation’s leadership in servo writing and precision cartridge manufacturing helps the Ultrium system achieve its groundbreaking combination of high capacity, high performance and outstanding reliability. This is the first in four generations of Ultrium tape cartridges we will develop, each designed to help customers keep pace with their ever-growing data storage needs.”

According to Imation, the Black Watch Ultrium tape cartridges are manufactured with a proprietary three-piece tape spool that delivers improved tape handling for better tracking and fewer errors and a proprietary corner snap on the door corner, which is typically the weakest corner of the cartridge. In addition, Imation says it conducted a three-phase performance verification on every cartridge and included a built-in cartridge memory chip that is inherent to all Ultrium-format tape cartridges. The memory chicp allows historical usage and other information to be read without inserting the cartridge
into a drive.