LTO tape drives are professional grade devices and are usually equiped with interfaces more common in server or data-center environments. LTO drives thus usually come with either SCSI or FibreChannel (FC) connectors. So connecting a LTO drive to a PC usually involves equipping the host computer with a suitable interface card. Add a Fibre Channel cable and you are ready to go. A simple point-to-point connection will work fine. "LTO" is short for "Linear Tape-Open",

The Host Bus Adapter

better known from the SCSI world but very similar for Fibre Channel is the interface card for the host computer, the Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapter (HBA). These usually come as PCIe add-on cards and feature a single, dual or more port connection terminal. Common speeds are 4G, 8G, or 16G. If your tape drive has two ports, you can go for a dual‑port HBA, but for example LTO-4 drives usually come with a single port consisting of a TX and RX connector each.

Fibre Channel Cable

You'll need an LC‑to‑LC fiber optic cable. "LC" stands for "Lucent Connector" (or colloquially sometimes "Little Connector"). "LC-to-LC" just means that this cable has the LC connector on both ends. Also, these cable are usually "duplex", eaming a pair of two fiber cables, one for transmit (TX) and one for receive (RX). For LTO-4 and/or shorter cable lengths, an OM3 cable would suffice. Similarly as with Ethernet cabling, cables are certified to a certein degree of quality. For fibre optic cables this is the "OM" scheme. An OM3 cable is a multimode-fibre with 50/125 µm core diameter. OM4 cabling is a little better and equally suited for a basic connection. Just use this symmetric cable to connect your host computer's HBA with the LTO drive.

Finishing touch: Software

After connecting the drive, the out-of-the-box support of an LTO drive differs based on Operating System. On Linux and Windows, LTO drives simply "appear" as SCSI drives, on macOS getting a drive to work can be troublesome. On Linux the kernel exposes the drive a standard SCSI drive usually under /dev/st0 or similar and from there you can control it via (traditional) standard UNIX tools like mt (control magnetic tape drive operation) or data output tools like dd, cpio or tar. On Windows and within the Apple ecosystem, operating tape is much more vendor based and usually relies on commercial applications. On both, Windows and macOS, users would use a commercial stack to cover basic tape operation and layer higher-level abstractions like LTFS (Linear Tape file System) on top to mount tapes as (or similar to) a filesystem, typically via a driver plus a small GUI or command‑line tools. Higher-level abstractions and backup suites are also available on Linux (e.g. bacula).