LTO roadmap extends to 365 TB per cartridge as tape storage refuses to die

In a world where SSDs with up to 256TB capacity are about to enter the scene to compete against hard disk drives that store over 40TB, magnetic tape storage may seem archaic. However, the 25-year-old Linear Tape-Open (LTO) format continues to evolve at a rather impressive pace.

The current LTO-10 generation stores up to 40TB of uncompressed data per cartridge, while HPE, IBM, and Quantum — the companies behind the LTO Program — now envision LTO-14 cartridges with up to 365TB of native capacity. But capacity is not the only advantage of LTO. In fact, the consortium has deliberately slowed its capacity roadmap in a bid to prioritize reliability, cost per terabyte, and manageable backup and recovery times over the previous goal of doubling capacity with every generation.

LTO began in 2000 with the LTO-1 format, which stored just 100GB of data natively and transferred it at 20 MB/s. …