Today, all types of businesses rely on data as a key corporate asset. You must be able to access data quickly and reliably, archive large databases and retrieve them when needed, and complete these tasks economically - whether you are using a high-performance network server or an individual workstation. The IBM Ultrium External Tape Drive is one building block of a family of scalable, flexible tape solutions. By leveraging advanced Linear Tape-Open (LTO) technology, the IBM Tape Drive is suited for handling the backup, save/restore, and archival data storage needs of a wide range of small systems.The IBM Ultrium External Tape Drive has a capacity of up to 200 GB with compression (2: 1). As your needs grow, you can build on this storage investment by moving to the IBM Tape Autoloader (2: 1 compressed data capacity of up to 1.4 TB). As your storage requirements continue to grow, you can choose the IBM Ultrium Scalable Tape Library (2: 1 compressed data capacity of up to 14.4 TB) or the IBM UltraScalable Tape Library (2: 1 compressed data capacity of up to 496.2 TB). The tape media is interchangeable among all four devices. With its higher capacity and performance, the IBM Ultrium External Tape Drive is an excellent alternative to DLT, 1/4-inch, 4 mm, or 8 mm tape drives. It has a sustained data transfer rate of up to 30 MB/sec (compressed 2: 1).