LTO-10, the newest generation of the LTO Ultrium tape format, was announced today. Full-height drives and media are available for immediate ordering from vendors like Symply and Spectra Logic. Shipments of LTO-10 drives and media are to begin in June 2025.
The latest generation LTO tape offers native storage capacities of 30TB and 400MB/s transfer speed per cartridge. 2.5X compressed capacities of 75TB are also advertised per cartridge. LTO-10 provides a 66% increased capacity per cartridge than the prior generation LTO-9 tape. Supported interfaces include 32 Gb/s Fibre Channel and 12 Gb/s SAS.
Magnetic tape provides some of the most cost-effective digital storage with costs per TB. The prior generation LTO-9 tape cartridges at 18TB native sell for about $90, or about $5/TB. In high volume the LTO-10 tapes should provide even lower prices, perhaps closer to $3/TB native. This compares to our estimates of large data center HDD prices of about $10-12/TB.
These HDDs are available at capacities up to 36TB using HAMR or SMR technologies. The LTO program projects LTO generations of up to LTO-14. These new generations tended to be introduced every 2-3 years, although LTO-9 was introduced in September 2021, or about 3.5 years before the LTO-10 introduction.
In addition to lower storage prices compared to HDDs, LTO and other magnetic tape technologies are mostly used in library environments where the tape cartridges are stored on shelves until needed when they are accessed by robotic handling systems to load them into and out of drives where data is written or read. Many tape cartridges can be used for each drive and data is actively used only when it is in the drives.
As a consequence, the energy consumption per storage capacity for magnetic tape is much less than for HDDs, which are usually always on. Thus, magnetic tape can provide better total cost of ownership for a given storage capacity. This makes magnetic tape an important element in the digital storage hierarchy for retaining data that doesn’t need fast access. Coughlin Associates estimates that about 180 Exabytes of compressed, 2.5X native, capacity of magnetic tape was shipped in 2024.
According to Barry Rudolph, board member of storage systems company, Spectra Logic, the LTO program announced its initial product roadmap shortly after the introduction of LTO-1 in 2000. This was a gutsy thing to do. Up until LTO-9 the Ultrium/LTO Industry group composed of HPE, IBM, Quantum, Fujifilm, Sony and several other companies had generally achieved a doubling of native cartridge capacity with every generation. The prior LTO roadmap had LTO-9 targeted for 24TB, but when it was introduced, it was an 18TB product. LTO-9 drives could read LTO-8 cartridges, but not earlier generation LTO tapes. LTO-10 drives will have similar limitations for reading older cartridge readability.
The LTO generation roadmap before the introduction of LTO-10 targeted this product as up to 36TB. However, it is not uncommon for digital storage technologies to miss their targets in terms of capacity and other important characteristics.
Many storage technologies have had roadmaps for future products over the years, including HDDs and SSDs, often made by storage consortia or the individual companies. Making advances in these various storage technologies has been getting harder over time, slowing advances in storage density, among other characteristics, similar in some ways to the slowing of semiconductor lithographic advances.
For instance, prior HDD technology roadmaps showed the introduction of energy assisted magnetic recording many years before the introduction of this technology in shipping HDDs in the last 3 years.
Below is the current LTO roadmap for tape cartridge roadmap showing expectations for future products up to LTO-14. This roadmap still shows the LTO-10 as up to 36TB and LTO-14 as up to 576TB. We expect an updated version in the near future. We presume LTO-14 would still have 2.5X compressed storage capacities of over 1PB per cartridge.
LTO-10 magnetic tape cartridges with native storage capacities of 30TB are announced with shipments of cartridges and drives to occur in June 2025. Magnetic tape continues to provide some of the most cost effective and lowest energy digital storage technology in the market.
