- 40TB LTO cartridge brings tape storage into an AI-powered future
- Aramid film gives magnetic tape the strength to extend its life
- Magnetic tape storage remains the most cost-effective offline protection for critical business data.
Magnetic tape storage, long considered an obsolete technology, continues to defy predictions of its demise.
The LTO program, a collaboration between HPE, IBM and Quantum, introduced a new generation of LTO Ultrium cartridges with a built-in capacity of 40TB.
The development coincides with a renewed step-by-step plan up to generation 14, with the goal of achieving a capacity of 913 TB.
A new method for tape materials
The 40TB LTO-10 cartridge’s capacity increase is largely due to “aramid,” a new base film material that allows for thinner, smoother tapes, enabling longer tape lengths without increasing cartridge size.
Combined with drive head design improvements, the new media achieves an additional 10 TB of capacity over the 30 TB model, while remaining compatible with existing LTO-10 drives.
“Enterprises are moving from ad hoc storage to conscious ‘archive architectures’ that serve legal, sustainability and AI goals,” said Jon Brown, principal analyst at Omdia.
“This new 40TB LTO-10 capacity point improves on this architecture: fewer cartridges, fewer frames, less power and better security.”
This update is aimed at businesses that need to store large amounts of data spanning decades, from scientific research to financial data, while keeping energy and maintenance costs low.
Along with the 40TB announcement, technology vendors have changed their roadmap for the next generations of LTO, ranging from LTO-11 to LTO-14.
The roadmap now reaches the ambitious target of 913 TB per cartridge, in line with the expected increase in storage needs driven by AI and data-intensive applications.
“AI has transformed files into mission-critical assets,” said Stephen Bacon, vice president of product management for data protection solutions at HPE.
“The new 40TB LTO-10 cartridge will help large enterprises (in healthcare, financial services, media, research, manufacturing, government and more) efficiently consolidate petabytes, build cyber resilience through true offline space and maintain profitable, sustainable long-term retention.”
By prioritizing cost per terabyte, reliability and long-term scalability, the revised plan aims to keep the band competitive in an environment increasingly dominated by SSD performance.
The roadmap also includes faster storage and retrieval processes, supporting the growth of exabyte-scale infrastructure across all industries.
Testing of the new 40TB cartridges will begin soon and are expected to be available in early 2026.
Despite Elon Musk’s public rejection of older storage formats, tape still fulfills a specific function that neither flash drives nor SSD systems can replace.
Its offline nature provides protection against cyber attacks and data loss due to hardware failure.
This new roadmap suggests that Band will not only survive the AI era, but continue to adapt to it.