The HP C7971A is an LTO-1 Ultrium cartridge that has a 100 GB native storage capacity and a 200 GB compressed storage capacity. The transfer rate for the HP LTO-1 Ultrium C7971A is 20 MB/s native and up to 40 MB/s compressed data. The HP C7971A is fully read/write compatible with all LTO-1 and LTO-2 tape drives and autoloaders as well as read compatible with LTO-3 tape drives and autoloaders. The HP C7971A has a tape of length 609 meters and the cartridge is blue in color. Unlike LTO-2 tapes (which use PRML encoding), LTO-1 tapes (like the HP C7971A) use RLL encoding. Also the HP C7971A features the LTO-CM (Linear Tape Open – Cartridge Memory) that permits simple determination and disregard of old data, as well as reliable read and write operations in even the most challenging environments. It can also contain user specified information.