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- 10. Generation LTO is finally here, four years after 9. Gen launched
- It will have a 30 TB capacity, far less than the originally scheduled 48TB
- LTO draft schedule runs to 576TB which may not be displayed until 2040 to the current speed
If you want to back up the tens of thousands of petabytes of data or even more, here are some good news for you. Without much fanfare, IBM, Symply and Spectra Logic have published LTO-10 messages over the past 48 hours.
In 2014, announced in 2014, the 10th iteration of linear tape is open technology. This tape media can now reach 30 TB Native capacity and a staggering 75TB compressed (using the industrial standard on the ratio of 2.5: 1).
Even more surprising is that the transfer rate remained at 400 MB/s, whereby improvements to step -by -step speed were the norm of the previous nine generations. In theory, filling a whole bond would take a little less than a day.
LTO takes its time
Even if 30TB sounds amazing, it is significantly smaller than that was originally suggested. Eight years ago When the LTO organization published their Ultrium Roadmap, it listed the LTO-10 as a 48TB model that dropped to 36 TB in the latest, from 2022, and now the actual product launched with ‘only’ 30TB.
It is 67% higher than the capacity of the new LTO-9 band (18TB) But only 25% higher than for the old LTO-9 alleged tape capacity (24tb). In other words, six LTO-10 ribbons can replace 10 LTO-9 bands.
Back then, the LTO consortium told us, “Doubling capacity approximately every two years is still technically possible for LTO tape technology, and the LTO program expects to be able to return to this pattern for future generations”.
Why? Maybe because the legacy (hard drives) and exotic competitions (ceramics, DNA, silica) are not as convincing as originally planned. The First 30TB hard drive launched in January 2024 with 100 TB hard drives are expected to debut in 2030. LTO-9 hit the market in September 2021 and were delayed by a series of setbacks.
What is the next for LTO?
So one can expect LTO-11 launches sometime in 2029. LTO’s latest roadmap goes up to LTO-14 with an original capacity of 576 TB, but this document will almost certainly be changed due to LTO-10’s unexpected (and disappointing) capacity change.
Symply, a storage hardware expert launching the first LTO-9 band drive, begins sending LTO-10 products as early as mid-June 2025 from $ 11,995 (SAS) with devices equipped with other interfaces (Ethernet and Thunderbolt) that cost more.
Symply told Techradar Pro that they will soon provide price information to LTO-10 media. They also told us the “LTO-10 media is 1035 mi length, which is the same as LTO-9. It is a high density of the media that enables the higher capacity.”
LTO-9 is currently the cheapest of the LTO family and costs about $ 5 per day. Tb; A 30TB tape is likely to sell for more than $ 150. IBM, one of the founders of LTO, has also announced an LTO 10 -band drive, While spectrogics advertised support for the new media.
25 years and still goes strong
It has already been a quarter of a century since the LTO-1 hit the market and while it has many critics (Including within the US Government), its resilience, value for money and the ability to adapt to countless storage requirements makes it a reliable partner regardless of the use case.
We witnessed the passing of competitors (which Sony’s Oda) and while alternative forms of storage (Most notable Cerabyte) Show exciting potential, they are still very far from reaching the same status as ties.
