MagStor Take
Record shipment numbers settle the debate: tape is not winding down, it is scaling up. The LTO Program's 2023 full-year figures — reported May 2024 — clocked 152.9 exabytes of compressed capacity shipped, a 3.14% year-over-year increase and an all-time high. For M&E and archive IT teams evaluating cold-storage economics, this is the confirmation that tape's cost curve and capacity roadmap remain the strongest argument in the data tier.
The Story
The LTO Program's annual shipment report for 2023 recorded a record 152.9 exabytes of compressed tape capacity shipped, driven by accelerating demand from enterprises and hyperscalers managing explosive unstructured data growth — including AI and analytics workloads. The current generation delivers 45 TB compressed per cartridge at transfer speeds up to 1,000 MB/s compressed, with hardware encryption and WORM support built in. The technology roadmap, published in 2022, extends through LTO-14 and targets up to 1.4 petabytes compressed per cartridge, signaling a cost-per-terabyte curve that keeps improving for decades ahead.
Source
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