UK archive management software vendor Software Generation Ltd (SGL) is supporting the linear tape file system (LTFS), which is a revised approach to content archive and storage management in broadcast. SGL demonstrated at the IBC exhibition in Amsterdam how an LTFS-driven archive can change current media archive practices, allowing free material exchange between disparate systems and bringing true content portability closer, enabled by dragging and dropping.
LTFS tapes contain two partitions, one for raw data and the other an index partition for descriptive data. The index partition enables faster access to the raw data. LTO-5 media can store 1.5TB of uncompressed material and write at a speed of up to 140MB/s.
Major storage manufacturers HP and IBM are providing operating system drivers that allow LTO-5 tape drives to be directly connected to PCs, Macs and Linux machines. This means that users can add a single tape drive to a small-scale system in the same way they would add a USB hard drive, for example.
