The OWC Mercury Pro LTO is the answer to this challenge. This easily integrated tape backup and archiving solution is a mission-critical requirement for protecting and preserving huge volumes of data for longer periods with familiar drag-and-drop operation, and better economies of scale than disk-based storage. Ruggedly small with a built-in handle, the Mercury Pro LTO is able to go on-set or move among studio, department, or office computers for a shared data protection solution.

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Configurable
Add up to a 16TB SSD in the universal 2.5/3.5-inch drive expansion bay

Expansive
Utilize the second Thunderbolt (USB-C) port² to add up to five additional Thunderbolt devices, or your choice of a USB-C or DisplayPort device

See More
DisplayPort 1.4 for connecting up to an 8K display³

Charge While Working
85W of notebook charging 

Transportable
Compact form factor with built in handles for moving between set and studio

Complete
Includes LTO data tape, cleaning tape, and Thunderbolt cable

Worry-Free
Up to 3 Year OWC Limited Warranty with expert support⁴

There’s a priceless convenience of familiarity in using the OWC Mercury Pro LTO to protect your data. By using archiving industry standard Linear Tape Open (LTO) tapes formatted with the Linear Tape File System (LTFS), the tapes can be accessed on your computer just like a hard drive or SSD. Files appear in folders and moving them to/retrieving them from tape is drag and drop easy. And compatibility has never been more simple…thanks to LTFS, LTO tapes can be read from a system running macOS, Windows, or Linux, so there’s no extra software to buy or proprietary hardware concerns.

Because LTFS is an open, cross-platform system, and LTO tape is the dominant archiving medium that has continued to advance since being introduced in 2000, you can be confident knowing you'll be able to access your data with any brand of LTO hardware for decades to come. The Mercury Pro LTO uses the latest LTO-7, LTO-8, or LTO-9 tapes.

Whether you need to keep sensitive data secure during transportation, or ensure irreplaceable data will be archive protected, the OWC Mercury Pro LTO enables healthcare, financial, and related industries to meet strict legal and regulatory procedures for data confidentiality and integrity. By using a WORM (Write Once, Read Many) LTO tape, you can store your data in a non-erasable, non-rewritable format to prevent accidental overwrite or malicious data alteration.

LTO Tape archiving is used by a wide variety of industries for diverse needs:

• Anyone seeking offsite data storage that is separated from the read/write host.
• Businesses desiring database and content backup protection against ransomware, cyber-attacks, and operations disruption due to natural disasters.
• Local, State, and Federal Government agencies with ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance) workflows; videos and files related to law/ordinance passage and day-to-day operations.
• Healthcare providers and organizations with medical records and imaging data.
• Educational institutions needing to keep a myriad of data, including research, produced by students, teachers, and professors accessibly protected while freeing up more costly storage options for short term use and backup.
• Video surveillance operations with increasing number of higher resolution color cameras.
• Motion picture industry production companies needing to meet bondable and insurable archive requirements.
• Digital media companies freeing up production disk capacity to shorten production windows by reusing and editing existing footage for new productions.

The Mercury Pro LTO enables you to archive data seamlessly in your workflow via the included Thunderbolt cable connected to your Mac or PC. You can also optionally enhance your workflow by:

1. Adding up to a 16TB SSD to the 2.5/3.5-inch drive expansion bay for extra storage and backup capacity.
2. Connecting a USB 3.0, USB-C, or Thunderbolt (USB-C) device to the Mercury Pro LTO’s second Thunderbolt port for added functionalities.
3. Adding a second display with up to 8K resolution via the DisplayPort 1.4 interface.
4. Keeping your notebook charged with the 85W Thunderbolt port.

OWC’s ArGest Backup makes it easy to manage LTO-based backups and archival with Drag and Drop ease of use and Enterprise-class reliability. Supporting both the ultra-reliable BRU archival format as well as the LTFS bulk data transport format, ArGest Backup provides the best solution for both long-term backup and archival as well as the LTFS data transfer format.

Mercury Pro LTO works with other industry leading archiving and management software including: Pomfort Silverstack XT, Hedge Canister, YoYotta LTFS, XenData6 Workstation, Archiware P5, and more.

LTO solutions like the Mercury Pro LTO have become a workflow requirement for production companies like Netflix, which employing a 3:2:1 rule to safeguard OCF (original camera footage), provide off-site backup, and fulfill long-term archiving of series and films.

In every “rule,” Netflix lists LTO tapes as an acceptable archival  format, and a critical  component  in  meeting  their partner data management requirements.