Months after Elon Musk's DOGE crusade to wipe it out, LTO tape storage is bigger than ever — a record 176.5 exabytes shipped in 2024, the fourth consecutive year of growth

Data seen by Tom’s Hardware from the LTO Program Technology Provider Companies (TPCs) makes it clear that tape storage is a long way from becoming obsolete. In fact, the latest numbers from the TPCs (namely, HPE, IBM, and Quantum) suggest that tape storage shipments have broken records with their fourth consecutive year of growth. Going by the numbers, there were 176.5 exabytes of compressed LTO tape capacity shipped in 2024. Shipments were thus up 15.4% vs the prior year.

The TPEs credit this continued growth of LTO to enterprises relying on tape to fuel their implementations of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) technologies. Tape fills a significant niche in modern storage architectures, complementing the likes of disk, flash, and cloud solutions.

Growth is also fuelled by the underlying qualities of LTO tape storage, such as cost-friendliness and longevity. “Setting a new growth record for the fourth year in a row, LTO tape technology continues to prove its longevity as a leading enterprise storage solution,” said Bruno Hald, GM of Secondary Storage, Quantum. “Organizations navigating their way through the AI/ML era need to reconfigure their storage architectures to keep up, and LTO tape technology is an essential piece of the puzzle for those seeking a cost-friendly, sustainable, and secure solution to support modern technology implementation and the resulting data growth.”

Linear Tape-Open (LTO) format roadmap currently goes up to 1,440TB per cart

LTO-10 is the latest format specification for LTO Ultrium tape drives and media. It can reportedly “provide the same blazing speed as LTO-9 with higher capacity and density (30 TB per cartridge, up to 75 TB compressed), [and] quantum-safe encryption.” Roadmaps we have seen extend to LTO-14, which offers up to a gargantuan 576TB per cartridge, which can fit up to 1,440TB compressed.

We repeat, tape isn’t dead

Any industry enjoying a 15.4% uplift over the prior year could easily be framed as one that is thriving. However, tape seems to have negative connotations, principally that of being ‘old technology’ and thus ripe for replacement with something more ‘modern.

This feeling that tried, trusted, and established equals outdated seems to have been the driving force behind the U.S. government’s DOGE triumphantly crowing that it “just saved $1M per year by converting 14,000 magnetic tapes (70-year-old technology for information storage) to permanent modern digital records,” back in April.

A community note quickly popped up to counter DOGE’s assertions, noting that “despite its age, magnetic tape is still highly favorable for long-term, static data archives.”

Cost-effectiveness measures like TCO, longevity, offline security, and high capacity all remain in the format’s favor in 2025.

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Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.

14 Comments Comment from the forums

Exploding PSU

It's super hard for me to wrap around how massive 576 terabytes worth of storage is..

Just the other day, I finished what I like to call MOAB (Mother of all backups) in preparation for a Backblaze upload.
A backup of every single media files (videos, pictures, music) and documents that my family has ever created and downloaded since the late-2000s.
Absolutely everything is included in it, from copies of old digicam videos, CD / DVD rips, various data from dozens of old phones we owned over the years, scans of physical photo albums, texts, even the random stuff like files I found on forgotten thumb drives. I had to bring various old devices to the repair shop just to extract the data from those old, broken things.

If one of us captured, wrote, or recorded it, then it's in that backup..
From something as important as pictures of me growing up to something as inconsequential as Untitled.txt file containing just the letter 'a' that I made for some reason.
From irreplaceable videos like a wedding vow to an accidental voice record of me butt dialing random contacts from a decade ago..
Every single thing is in there.
And that complete digital history of our lives "only" amounts to just shy of 6 TB ...

576 TB is.... impossible for me to grasp.
Reply
Thecommi

Your wife must not take pictures of every meal she eats!
Reply
pug_s

Exploding PSU said:
It's super hard for me to wrap around how massive 576 terabytes worth of storage is..

Just the other day, I finished what I like to call MOAB (Mother of all backups) in preparation for a Backblaze upload.
A backup of every single media files (videos, pictures, music) and documents that my family has ever created and downloaded since the late-2000s.
Absolutely everything is included in it, from copies of old digicam videos, CD / DVD rips, various data from dozens of old phones we owned over the years, scans of physical photo albums, texts, even the random stuff like files I found on forgotten thumb drives. I had to bring various old devices to the repair shop just to extract the data from those old, broken things.

If one of us captured, wrote, or recorded it, then it's in that backup..
From something as important as pictures of me growing up to something as inconsequential as Untitled.txt file containing just the letter 'a' that I made for some reason.
From irreplaceable videos like a wedding vow to an accidental voice record of me butt dialing random contacts from a decade ago..
Every single thing is in there.
And that complete digital history of our lives "only" amounts to just shy of 6 TB ...

576 TB is.... impossible for me to grasp.
First of all 576 TB raw tapes are not out yet. The current generation is 10 which is 30TB raw. The group which keeps peddling LTO tape drives are only implementing smaller incremental gains on tape drive which is supposed to be 36TB for gen 10 LTO tapes.

Second issue is cost. The 30tb LTO tapes is about $300 now in which is about 1/3-1/2 price of the similar hard drive. The previous generation Gen 9 tapes is 18tb raw is about $100 which is about 1/3-1/2 price of a similar hard drive.
Reply
leclod

pug_s said:
Second issue is cost. The 30tb LTO tapes is about $300 now in which is about 1/3-1/2 price of the similar hard drive.
I just bought a 24TB drive for 320usd, just saying
Reply
SomeoneElse23

leclod said:
I just bought a 24TB drive for 320usd, just saying
There's a decent chance that tape will last far longer than that drive will.
Reply
passivecool

HDDs must be powered up for data reconstitution every year or so
HDDs therefore are often left 'online', which makes them resource hungry and vulnerable
LTO tapes store cold offline for 20+ years.
And Ethan Hunt can't plug a USB drive into a tape reel on his covert way though the system.
Reply
passivecool

@ Exploding PSURESPECT for your MOAB! I'm way behind you there *shame*
A reminder to everyone else here that if it is worth keeping, it needs backups.

Data consumption continues to develop exponentially.
Got a company with, say, 1000 employees and 1 million customers over 20 years - that's a lot of transactional data, access logs and whatever else to archive - and tape can look mighty attractive...

The data sent with the voyager on a 12" phonograph should last about 1bn years. All a matter of priorities.
Reply
Tanakoi

Months after Elon Musk's DOGE crusade to wipe it out, LTO tape storage is bigger than ever
The entire purpose of this lackwitted -- and highly inaccurate -- headline seems to be to make a backhanded political slap at DOGE and Musk. The tapes being converted certainly weren't modern LTO digital tapes, but the (much) older analog reel and cassette tapes, some of which I know personally are still being used by the Federal Government.
Reply
Misgar

leclod said:
I just bought a 24TB drive for 320usd, just saying
Perhaps it's time for me to upgrade my old LTO-4 SAS drives, but I still have a vast number of empty tapes to fill.

Exploding PSU said:
And that complete digital history of our lives "only" amounts to just shy of 6 TB ...
When I come back from a 4 week vacation, I usually have 650GB of RAW + JPG images. They fit nicely on to an 800GB tape.

Then there's the 44,000 Kodachrome slides (transparencies) scanned at 4000 dpi in Nikon NEF format.

Now that I've started shooting 4K GoPro movies, I'm accumulating 12GB video files.

It all adds up and tapes with the write protect tab clicked over are relatively immune from ransomware.
Reply
j_123

The authors on this site are just a bunch of Musk haters. Try someone else, it's getting old.
Reply

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