The LTO consortium has updated the LTO Ultrium roadmap in collaboration with some of the greatest brands in tape storage (HPE, IBM, and Quantum).
The group has reached 288TB and 576TB uncompressed after a five-year gestation period; controversially, the tape industry often adds 150% capacity to create a second "up-to" compressed storage.
As a result, it is anticipated that a Gen13 tape will have a compressed capacity of 720TB and a Gen14 number will have a massive 1.44PB. Currently, the largest hard drive is 22 terabytes, while the greatest SSD is 100 terabytes.
ready to face some formidable obstacles?
The most recent LTO-9 tape increased this figure by 225 times (45TB) and shows no signs of slowing down since the initial LTO tape, which first debuted 22 years ago, had a 200GB compressed capacity.
Or does it? Legal and technological issues made the switch from LTO-8 to LTO-9 challenging, and the consortium unilaterally decided to boost capacity by 50% in 2020 rather than double it.
LTO-14 might be up to 15 years away from now, providing the consortium doesn't opt to reset the timeline once again, given the two- to three-year gap between the mass availability of the most recent generation of LTO tapes, with LTO-9 being the latest.
Other technologies (DNA, Holographic, Optical, Glass) may have developed and advanced by 2037 to pose a significantly greater danger to the venerable tape. LTO-10 was expected to appear sooner rather than later, but we still haven't seen it as of last year.
The transfer rate, which is now 0.75GBps for LTO-8 and 1GBps for LTO-9, was not mentioned in the statement (both compressed). Given the storage capacity being evaluated, a 33% generational improvement would increase the transfer rate for LTO-14 to around 4GBps, which may be quite problematic for both archiving and retrieval.
LTO-9 tapes are priced at roughly $8 per TB, whereas LTO-8 tapes are the least expensive at $4.50 per TB and LTO-7 ones cost up to $6.30. By the time LTO-14 eventually enters the market, one can anticipate prices to have decreased dramatically, with sub-$1 being a near-certainty. The OWC Mercury Pro LTO-9 tape drive we evaluated in February 2022 went for more than $6,000. Readers are probably still costly.
Having said that, tape has a place in the tiered storage hierarchy, whether it be in cold storage (either for cloud backup or cloud storage), as a tool to prevent data loss from ransomware via air-gapping, or as a mechanism for regulatory compliance (such as Sarbanes-Oxley or HIPAA) via its WORM (Write Once, Read Many) feature.
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