- The tenth Lto generation is finally here, four years after the launch of the ninth generation
- It will have a capacity of 30 TB, much less than the 48TB originally planned
- The Lto road map works at 576TB, which may not appear until 2040 at the current speed
If you want to make a backup copy of dozens of data Petabytes or even more, here are some good news for you. Without much fanfare, IBM, Syxply and Spectral Logic have made separate LTO-10 ads in the last 48 hours.
Announced in 2014, LTO-10 is the tenth iteration of open linear tape technology. This tape medium can now reach the native capacity of 30 TB and an amazing amount of 75 TB compressed (using the standard of the industry of the 2.5: 1).
Even more surprising is that the transfer rate remained at 400 MB/s, so incremental speed improvements were the standard in the previous nine generations. In theory, filling a complete tape would take a little less than a day.
Lto is taking his time
Even if 30TB sounds fantastic, it is significantly smaller than it originally proposed. Eight years ago When the LTO organization published its ultrium roadmap, it listed the LTO-10 as a 48TB model, which fell to 36TB in the most recent, since 2022, and now the real product launched with ‘Solo’ 30TB.
That is 67% higher than the capacity of the new LTO-9 tape (18 TB) but only 25% higher than that of the old LTO-9 tape capacity (24 TB). In other words, six LTO-10 tapes can replace 10 LTO-9 tapes.
At that time, the LTO consortium told us: “Duplicate the capacity of approximately two years is still technically feasible for the technology of LTO tape and the LTO program anticipates being able to return to that pattern in future generations.”
Because? Perhaps because the legacy (hard drives) and exotic competitions (ceramics, DNA, silica) are not as convincing as originally planned. He First 30TB hard drive released in January 2024 with 100TB hard drives are expected to debut by 2030. Lto-9 arrived on September 2021 and was delayed by a series of setbacks.
What’s still for Lto?
Therefore, one can expect that LTO-11 will be launched at some point in 2029. The last LTO roadmap rises to LTO-14 with a native 576TB capacity, but this document will surely be changed due to the change of unexpected (and disappointing) capacity of LTO-10.
Symply, an expert in storage hardware that launched the first unit of LTO-9 tape, will begin to send LTO-10 products in 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 provide price details for LTO-10 media soon. They also told us that “the LTO-10 media are 1035 m long, which is the same as LTO-9. It is a high density in the media that allow the greatest capacity.”
Lto-9 is currently the cheapest of the Lto family, which costs around $ 5 per TB; A 30 TB tape would probably be sold for more than $ 150. IBM, one of the founders of Lto, has also announced a unit of tape Lto 10, While spectra logic Announced support for the new media.
25 years and remain strong
A quarter of a century has passed since Lto-1 reached the market and, although it has many critics (Including within the United States government), Its resistance, value for money and ability to adapt to innumerable storage demands makes it a reliable partner regardless of the use case.
We witnessed the disappearance of the competitors (such as Sony Ode) and while alternative storage forms (more remarkably Cerabyte) Shows an exciting potential, they are still far from reaching the same state as the tape.
