What is LTO tape?

It’s magnetic tape used for data storage. LTO stands for Linear Tape Open. It was originally developed in the late 1990s by HP, IBM and Quantum. LTO is widely used with small and large computer systems, usually for backup, but also for archiving.
Magnetic tape has been used for data storage for more than 50 years and LTO provides excellent performance and capacity in both stand-alone and automated environments. LTO has a large amount of lifespan and if you are normally writing only 50% of the tape’s capacity this will double the tape’s lifespan.

Every LTO cartridge has a cartridge memory chip inside it. It is made up of blocks of memory, and this memory can be read and/or written, and is used to identify tapes, to help drives discriminate between different generations of the technology, and to store tape-use information.