The IBM TS2270 Tape Drive (machine type 3580 model H7S) is an external, stand-alone or rack mountable unit, designed to offer high capacity and performance for the midrange systems environment. The TS2270 incorporates the IBM Linear Tape-Open (LTO) Ultrium 7 Half-High SAS Tape Drive and is designed to support LTO Generation 7 media specification native data rate performance of up to 300 MB/sec compared to the IBM TS2260 LTO Half-High tape drive (Ultrium 6) of up to 160 MB/sec native data transfer rate. The TS2270 tape drive supports the LTO Generation 7 specifications for LTO tape drive technology, and LTO Generation 7 media to a compressed capacity of up to 15 TB with 2.5 to 1 compression (up to 6 TB native capacity) compared to previous LTO 6 compressed capacity of up to 6.25 TB with 2.5:1 compression (up to 2.5 TB native capacity) per tape cartridge. The TS2270 can read and write to Ultrium 7 and Ultrium 6 cartridges, and is read compatible with Ultrium 5 data cartridges. The Ultrium 7 tape drive is encryption-capable and designed to support application-managed encryption.

The TS2270 tape drive uses a 6 Gbps dual-port SAS interface for connection to a wide spectrum of system servers, including select IBM Power Systems models, IBM Pureflex systems, and IBM BladeCenters. The TS2270 also supports Microsoft Windows, Sun Solaris, and UNIX operating systems.