LTO Buyer’s Guide: Drive vs Autoloader vs Library

The first question is not how much capacity you need. It is how much of the tape handling you want to do by hand. That decides whether you buy a drive, an autoloader or a library.

Once a Maltese business decides it wants tape, for the offline, air-gapped copy that disk and cloud cannot give, the next question is which kind of tape system to buy. The range runs from a single drive you load by hand to a rack-scale library holding petabytes, and the gap in price and capability between them is large. The good news is that the choice is more straightforward than the spec sheets make it look, because it comes down to three things in order: how much you have to back up, how long you have to keep it, and how much of the day-to-day tape handling you are willing to do manually. This guide walks through that decision and maps it to the actiData range Sirap supplies. If you are still deciding between tape, disk and cloud in the first place, start with our LTO vs NAS vs cloud guide.

The distinction that decides everything: automation, not capacity

The thing that separates a drive, an autoloader and a library is not mainly how much they hold, it is how many tapes they can handle without a person. A standalone drive holds one cartridge at a time, and someone has to physically swap it for the next backup. An autoloader holds several tapes in magazines and changes them automatically, so a week’s backups run unattended. A library does the same at larger scale, with more slots, more than one drive, and features for running and managing serious volumes of tape. Capacity follows from that, because more slots means more total terabytes, but the reason to move up a tier is almost always that the manual handling at the tier below has become a daily chore or a risk. Get the automation level right and the capacity tends to fall into place.

The three tiers, and who each suits

Standalone drive: simplest, one tape at a time

A standalone LTO drive is the entry point. You connect it to a server over SAS, your backup software writes to the cartridge, and then you eject it and store it safely. It is the cheapest way into genuine offline backup and perfectly sound for a single server or a small site, as long as someone is reliably there to change the tape. The limit is exactly that human step: if a backup needs more than one cartridge, or nobody remembers to swap it, the backup does not complete. Sirap supplies this as the actiTape external drive for desktop use, and as a rackmount drive where you want it in the rack.

Autoloader: unattended backup for a small business

An autoloader adds automation. The actiLib 1U autoloader holds 8 cartridges across two magazines and one drive, and changes them on schedule, so a weekly rotation runs without anyone touching it day to day. This is the right tier for most small and mid-sized Maltese businesses: enough slots for a sensible rotation, tapes you can still lift out and take offsite, and no daily manual swap. It is the point where tape backup stops depending on someone remembering.

Library: serious capacity, more automation, growth

A library is where capacity, throughput and resilience scale up together. The fixed 2U library holds 24 slots and up to two drives with a mail slot for adding or removing single tapes mid-rotation. Above it, the scalable Kodiak 3416 (40 slots, up to 3 drives, dual redundant power, expandable into the petabytes) and the larger Kodiak 6807 (80 slots per module, up to 6 drives, to multi-petabyte) are for organisations with real, growing archives and retention obligations. The reasons to be at this tier are capacity that a fixed unit cannot hold, the need to run backup and restore in parallel on more than one drive, or the need for dual redundant power so the archive cannot be taken down by a power-supply failure.

A quick decision table