Media compatibility

The TS2290 tape drive uses the IBM® LTO Ultrium TB data cartridge and is compatible with the cartridges of its predecessor, the IBM Ultrium Tape Drive Generation 8.

The drive reads tapes that are written by other licensed Ultrium 8 and 9 drives, and writes to tapes that are read by other licensed Ultrium 8 and 9 drives.

Ultrium 9 is able to read and write Ultrium 8 cartridges, and thus can interchange data with Ultrium 8 tape drives. However, the Ultrium 9 drive allows an Ultrium 8 cartridge to be written only at the LTO Generation 8 operating point (12 TB). M8 cartridges are not supported. Unlike prior generations, read-only support for 2nd generation media such as LTO 7 is no longer supported. See Cartridge Compatibility.