- The 40TB LTO Cartridge Paves the Way for Tape Storage to an AI-Powered Future
- Aramid film gives the magnetic tape strength and extends its service life.
- Tape storage remains the cheapest standalone means of protecting mission-critical enterprise data
For a long time it was considered an outdated technology, magnetic tape storage continues to defy predictions of extinction.
The LTO program, a collaboration between HPE, IBM and Quantum, introduced a new generation of LTO Ultrium cartridges with a native capacity of 40 TB.
The development coincides with the updated roadmap spanning generation 14, which aims to achieve a capacity of 913 TB.
A new approach to tape materials
The increase in capacity of the 40TB LTO-10 cartridge is largely due to “Aramid”, a new base film material that allows for a thinner, smoother tape, allowing for longer tape lengths without increasing cartridge size.
Combined with head design improvements, the new drive offers an additional 10 TB of capacity over the 30 TB model while remaining compatible with existing LTO-10 drives.
“Enterprises are moving away from dedicated storage to purpose-driven ‘archive architectures’ that serve AI, legal and sustainability goals,” said John Brown, senior analyst at Omdia.
“The new 40TB LTO-10 capacity point enhances this architecture with fewer cartridges, fewer frames, lower power consumption and greater security.”
The upgrade is designed for businesses that need to store large data sets over decades, from scientific research to financial reports, while keeping energy and maintenance costs low.
Coinciding with the 40TB announcement, technology vendors have adjusted their roadmap for future generations of LTO, starting with LTO-11 and ending with LTO-14.
The roadmap now reaches an ambitious level of 913 TB per cartridge, in line with the projected increase in storage demand from artificial intelligence and data-intensive applications.
“AI has transformed archives into strategic assets,” said Stephen Bacon, vice president of product management for data protection solutions at HPE.
“The new 40TB LTO-10 cartridge will help enterprise-class organizations—in healthcare, financial services, media, research, manufacturing, public sector and beyond—efficiently consolidate petabytes, increase cyber resilience with true self-contained air-gap, and ensure long-term storage availability and resiliency.”
By prioritizing cost per terabyte, reliability and long-term scalability, the revised plan aims to keep tape drives competitive in an environment increasingly dominated by solid-state drives.
The roadmap also includes accelerating data storage and retrieval, supporting exabyte infrastructure growth across all industries.
Testing of the new 40TB cartridges will begin soon, with availability expected in early 2026.
Despite Elon Musk's public refusal of old data storage formatsthe tape continues to perform a specific function that neither flash drives neither SSD systems can be replaced.
Its autonomous nature provides protection against cyber attacks and data loss due to hardware failure.
This new roadmap suggests that the tape will not only survive the age of artificial intelligence, but will continue to adapt to it.
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