Fujifilm to begin shipping LTO Ultrium 10 40TB tape cartridges in January 2026

LTO tape storage system — (Image credit: The LTO Program)

Fujifilm has confirmed that its new LTO Ultrium 10 data cartridges with 40TB native capacity will begin shipping in January 2026, turning the highest-capacity tier of the LTO-10 generation into a commercially available product. The cartridges offer up to 100TB of capacity with compression and are designed to operate in the same LTO-10 drives already deployed for earlier 30TB media.

The launch adds a second capacity point within the LTO-10 generation, something that is unusual for LTO, which historically advances capacity only when a new drive generation arrives. In this case, Fujifilm is launching the 40TB cartridge as an “advanced iteration” of the 30TB cartridge instead of a straight-up replacement for it, giving customers a choice between 30TB and 40TB based on cost and storage density factors.

According to the company’s announcement, the increase in capacity comes from changes to the tape itself rather than the cartridge format or drive. Fujifilm says it has refined its fine hybrid magnetic particle formulation while also adopting a thinner base film made from aramid material. Together, these changes allow a 30% increase in tape length to be packed into the same physical cartridge without compromising durability or reliability.

Another practical change is a wider recommended operating range compared with earlier LTO-10 media. Fujifilm states that the new cartridges are validated for broader temperature and humidity ranges, which may be relevant for long-term archive deployments that operate outside tightly controlled data center environments; tape remains a common choice for cold storage because of its low idle power draw and long shelf life.

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Luke James is a freelance writer and journalist. Although his background is in legal, he has a personal interest in all things tech, especially hardware and microelectronics, and anything regulatory.

3 Comments Comment from the forums

Sluggotg

How long will data survive on these tapes? Brand new proprietary backup solutions are a risky investment.

Zip Drives where great back in the day.

But around that time they had a 10 megabyte micro floppy format that some company was pimping. They showed it at trade shows and go lots of press. They showed off the disks and gave approximate prices. Then.. they went under without having an actual working product.
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dutty handz

Sluggotg said:
How long will data survive on these tapes? Brand new proprietary backup solutions are a risky investment.

Zip Drives where great back in the day.

But around that time they had a 10 megabyte micro floppy format that some company was pimping. They showed it at trade shows and go lots of press. They showed off the disks and gave approximate prices. Then.. they went under without having an actual working product.
Please inform yourself before putting out questions easily answered by single word google search or doing straight up bad comparison. Even what you say about Zip is wrong. ZIP never had a 10MB disk, it was 100 or 250MB for ZIP drives, adding 750 at the tailend. ZIP drives and disk had serious reliability issues, leading to class-action suits in late 90s. You would have know that if you'd read a minute instead of spitting lies out.

LTO tape techonologies are new, if you consider being developed and commercialized since the 1990s new. One google search away...

Also, LTO is an industry joint-effort in maintaining the standard, including HP, IBM and Quantum, all leaders in datacenters offerings ; I know, with such lackluster backing, the datacenter ubiquitous tape tech is one sneeze away from leaving all datacenters in shambles without a solid footing.

Your comparison to ZIP, which never had any kind of datacenter presence, is ignorant at best. Iomega (the company behind ZIP or Jazz drives) never had datacenter, high-volume, high-retention market in view ; they targeted the pro-sumer space as a floppy drive successor as an easy way to transfer data in larger volume than what 3.5'' floppies could. You are trying to compare an emerging company (Iomega) emerging product (ZIP drives) to industry giants backed consortiums that developped an open-standard for datacenter backups, ironically during the same times. Iomega never targeted the datacenter, tapes never targeted end-user consumer, or even pro-sumer, they were always targeted at datacenter usage.

You know why their business went belly up : USB, with both its performance, largely superior to the parallel port used by most ZIP drives, plug-n-play of devices, including data thumbsticks. The ZIP/Jazz form factor simpy got beat in capacity. portability and easiness of use, right in the middle of its rise in awareness. Iomega tried multiple way to pivot around with ZIP drive on USB, but that merely added a middle-man device whereas with thumbdrives, you'd just plug it in ; the price delta between solution never was able to sway consumers.
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Sluggotg

WOW! You are a real fireball of hatred.

I never said ZIP disks came in 10megabyte size. Those were from a different company that was showing off their disks at trade shows and getting a lot of press for it. (It was vaporware). I can see how I could have worded my post more carefully so you would not be misled.

I never said ZIP disks/drives were for "Datacenters". They were used by businesses and home users. I had the original Parallel version then the USB version. I never had any issues with them.

I did not know LTO was from the late 90s. So nice of you to be friendly and polite in answering my question about how long the backups will last. (15-30 years).

"Flame on" Johnny Storm.
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